'Shout, Teddy,
to the honour of the saint,' said the foreman of the works (for they
had just completed the job). Poor Teddy's religion got the better of
his understanding, for in shouting long life to the dedicatory saint, he
lost his own--missed his footing, and pitched over the scaffold like an
odd chimney-pot in a high wind, and came down smash to the bottom with
a head as flat as a bump. Divil a word has he ever spake since; for when
they picked him up, he was dead as a Dublin bay herring--and now he
lies in his cabin in Dyot-street, St. Giles, as stiff as a poker,--and
to-night, your onor, we are going to _wake_ him, poor sowl! to smoke a
pipe, and spake an _horashon_ over his corpse before we put him dacently
to bed with the shovel. Then, there's his poor widow left childless, and
divil a rap to buy paraters wid--bad luck to the eye that wouldn't drap
a tear to his mimory, and cowld be the heart that refuses to comfort
his widow!" Here poor Barney could no longer restrain his feelings,
and having concluded the family history, blubbered outright. It was a
strange mixture of the ludicrous and the sorrowful; but told with such
an artless simplicity and genuine traits of feeling, that I would
have defied the most ~27~~volatile to have felt uninterested with the
speaker.
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