“By the soul of the priest!” at last exclaimed one of the Munster emigrees, “but it is him, and I would take my davy on it;—but sure enough, I will ax the jontleman himself now, whether he knows who he is, or if he is any body at all, at all!”
This real representative of the tag-rag and bob-tail of the Emerald Isle, was arrayed in the appropriate costume of his class and country. A nameless something that had once been a hat, covered a shock head of hair; the redundancy of which protuberated sideways and perpendicularly, from the ci-devant castor, in many a knotty combination, impervious to wind and weather. The fragments of a loose great coat decorated his tall athletic form, which scarcely reaching his knees, exposed fully to observation his nether habiliment,—
“His galligaskins, that had long withstood The winter's fury and encroaching frost By Time subdued,—what will not Time subdue, Now horrid rents disclosed, portending agues.”
His brawny legs were partially cased in worsted hose, the dilapidations of wear and tear ingeniously repaired with cloth, pieced and patched, and comprising all the prismatic colours of the rainbow; his toes, disdaining the trammels of duress, peeped through his brogues, as if anxious for freedom; and to complete the singularity of this strange figure, his vacant face was incrusted with filth, his bristly beard unshorn,—
And stuck in his mouth of capacious dimensions, That never to similar shape had pretensions, A pipe he sustain'd, short and jetty of hue, Thro' which the dense clouds of tobacco he drew.
This apparition stalking onwards to our admiring triumvirate,—“May be,” said he, “your honor can be after telling me,—will your honor be Sir Felix O'Grady of Munster, that is, long life to it?”—“The same, by the powers of my father who begot me!” exclaimed the baronet: “sure enough I am Sir Felix O'Grady that is, not that will be!” “Erin ma vorneen!” rejoined the enquirer,—“the pot of Saint Patrick be upon you, and may your honor live all the days of your life, and many years longer, if that's all!—Arrah, but I'm plased to my heart's content to meet wid your honor in a strange land!”
The congregated expectants now approached, and respectfully united their congratulations with those of their respectable deputy.—“The pot of Saint Patrick be upon you, and may your reverence live for ever and a day afterwards!” It was in vain that Sir Felix offered them money. “No, the devil a drap would they taste, unless it was wid his honor's own self, by the holy poker!”
There was no remedy; so Sir Felix, with his friends Dash all and Tallyho, who were much amused by this unsophisticated manifestation of Irish recognition, accompanied the motley groupe to the blue-ruin shop.{1}
