“My sister Dinah has, I verily believe, the most sovereign remedy for these pains.”
“Is it the green draught? Oh, don't I know it,” burst out the Major. “You might hear my shouts the day I took it down at Inistioge. There was n't a bit of skin left on my lips, and when I wiped the perspiration off my head my hair came off too. Aquafortis is like egg-flip compared to that blessed draught; and I remember well how I crawled to my writing-desk and wrote, 'Have me opened,' for I knew I was poisoned.”
“Did you tell my sister of your sufferings?”
“To be sure I did, and she only smiled and said that I took it when I was fasting, or when I was full, I forget which; and that I ought to have taken a brisk walk, and I only able to creep; and only one spoonful at a time, and it was the whole bottle I swallowed. In fact, she owned afterwards that nothing but the strength of a horse could have saved me.”
Peter found it very hard to maintain a decent gravity at the play of the Major's features, which during the narrative recalled every dire experience of his medicine.
“Well, come into the house and we'll give you something better,” said Barrington, at last.
“I think I saw your granddaughter at the window as I came by,—a good-looking young woman, and not so dark as I suspected she 'd be.”
“There's not a handsomer girl in Ireland; and as to skin, she 's not as brown as her father.”
“It wouldn't be easy to be that; he was about three shades deeper than a Portuguese.”
“George Barrington was confessedly the finest-looking fellow in the King's army, and as English-looking a gentleman as any man in it.”