“Poor McManus,” said O’Shaughnessy, “rest his soul! he’d have puzzled the bench of bishops for hard words. Upon my conscience, I believe he spent his mornings looking for them in the Old Testament. Sure ye might have heard what happened to him at Banagher, when he commanded the Kilkennys,—ye never heard the story? Well, then, ye shall. Push the sherry along first, though,—old Monsoon there always keeps it lingering beside his left arm.
“Well, when Peter was lieutenant-colonel of the Kilkennys,—who, I may remark, en passant, as the French say, were the neediest-looking devils in the whole service,—he never let them alone from morning till night, drilling and pipe-claying and polishing them up. ‘Nothing will make soldiers of you,’ said Peter, ‘but, by the rock of Cashel! I’ll keep you as clean as a new musket!’ Now, poor Peter himself was not a very warlike figure,—he measured five feet one in his tallest boots; but certainly if Nature denied him length of stature, she compensated for it in another way, by giving him a taste of the longest words in the language. An extra syllable or so in a word was always a strong recommendation; and whenever he could not find one to his mind, he’d take some quaint, outlandish one that more than once led to very awkward results. Well, the regiment was one day drawn up for parade in the town of Banagher, and as M’Manus came down the lines he stopped opposite one of the men whose face, hands, and accoutrements exhibited a most woeful contempt of his orders. The fellow looked more like a turf-stack than a light-company man.
“‘Stand out, sir!’ cried M’Manus, in a boiling passion. ‘Sergeant O’Toole, inspect this individual.’ Now, the sergeant was rather a favorite with Mac; for he always pretended to understand his phraseology, and in consequence was pronounced by the colonel a very superior man for his station in life. ‘Sergeant,’ said he, ‘we shall make an exemplary illustration of our system here.’
“‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant, sorely puzzled at the meaning of what he spoke.
“‘Bear him to the Shannon, and lave him there.’ This he said in a kind of Coriolanus tone, with a toss of his head and a wave of his right arm,—signs, whenever he made them, incontestibly showing that further parley was out of the question, and that he had summed up and charged the jury for good and all.
“‘Lave him in the river?’ said O’Toole, his eyes starting from the sockets, and his whole face working in strong anxiety; ‘is it lave him in the river yer honor means?’
“‘I have spoken,’ said the little man, bending an ominous frown upon the sergeant, which, whatever construction he may have put upon his words, there was no mistaking.
“‘Well, well, av it’s God’s will he’s drowned, it will not be on my head,’ says O’Toole, as he marched the fellow away between two rank and file.
“The parade was nearly over, when Mac happened to see the sergeant coming up all splashed with water and looking quite tired.
“‘Have you obeyed my orders?’ said he.