Put a clay pipe in [Richard] Nixon’s mouth and a hod on his shoulder or a shillelagh in his hand, and there, complete with beetling brows and uptilted nose, is the original of the old cartoon stereotype of the fighting Irishman—the Irishman of the draft riots or of Punch’s version of the Sinn Feiner.

If the fire, with its giant black kettle swung over the flames, is our never-extinguished shrine, then the stove is an altar. It is habitually tended by my step-aunt Calliope (usually known as Calli), a dark, stocky, dense-looking woman with beetling black brows and a tied-back sheaf of thick hair, still raven-black without a trace of silver after her forty-four years.

Beetling

Meaning

Verb

Noun

Adj