"I believe Ussher thinks," said George, "no one ran away with a girl before himself. Why if you were going to seize a dozen stills, you couldn't make more row about it."
"I shouldn't make any about that, for it would come natural to me; and I'd a deal sooner be doing that, than what I have to do to-morrow night. I'm d——d, but I'd sooner take a score of frieze-coats, with only five or six of my own men to back me, than drive twenty miles in a gig with a squalling girl."
"If you're sick of the job, I'll take her off your hands," said the good-natured Fred.
"Thank ye, no; as I've got so far with it, I believe I'll go on now."
"Well, if you won't take a kind offer about the girl, will you take the one I made about the mare? To tell the truth, I'd sooner have the mare than the girl myself."
"Thank ye, no; I believe I'll keep both."
"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Fred, getting anxious in his hankering after the mare, "I'll throw the harness into the bargain—spick and span new from Hamilton's. I paid eight pound ten for it not a month since. All the new fashion—brass fittings and brass haines. You could have the crests taken out, and new ones put in, for a few shillings; only send me down the old ones."
"What would I do with a gig and horse? Besides, the gig's shook, the shafts are all loose, and the boxes are battered; and the horse was saying his prayers lately, by the look of his knees."
"Never down in his life, by G——d," said George, willing to help his brother in a matter of horseflesh; "it's only a knock he got when I was trying to put him over the little wall beyond the lawn there; but I couldn't make the brute jump, though he's the sweetest horse in harness I ever sat behind."
Ussher was not to be done; and Fred consoled himself by assuring him that he'd be sorry for it, when he found the mare was not the least use in life down in Munster, and that no one would give him a twenty-pound note for her.