“A devilish good chant,” said Merivale, “but the air surpasses anything I ever heard,—thoroughly Irish, I take it.”
“Irish! upon my conscience, I believe you!” shouted O’Shaughnessy, with an energy of voice and manner that created a hearty laugh on all sides. “It’s few people ever mistook it for a Venetian melody. Hand over the punch,—the sherry, I mean. When I was in the Clare militia, we always went in to dinner to ‘Tatter Jack Walsh,’ a sweet air, and had ‘Garryowen’ for a quick-step. Ould M’Manus, when he got the regiment, wanted to change: he said, they were damned vulgar tunes, and wanted to have ‘Rule Britannia,’ or the ‘Hundredth Psalm;’ but we would not stand it; there would have been a mutiny in the corps.”
“The same fellow, wasn’t he, that you told the story of, the other evening, in Lisbon?” said I.
“The same. Well, what a character he was! As pompous and conceited a little fellow as ever you met with; and then, he was so bullied by his wife, he always came down to revenge it on the regiment. She was a fine, showy, vulgar woman, with a most cherishing affection for all the good things in this life, except her husband, whom she certainly held in due contempt. ‘Ye little crayture,’ she’d say to him with a sneer, ‘it ill becomes you to drink and sing, and be making a man of yourself. If you were like O’Shaughnessy there, six foot three in his stockings—‘Well, well, it looks like boasting; but no matter. Here’s her health, anyway.”
“I knew you were tender in that quarter,” said Power, “I heard it when quartered in Limerick.”
“May be you heard, too, how I paid off Mac, when he came down on a visit to that county?”
“Never: let’s hear it now.”
“Ay, O’Shaughnessy, now’s your time; the fire’s a good one, the night fine, and liquor plenty.”
“I’m convanient,” said O’Shaughnessy, as depositing his enormous legs on each side of the burning fagots, and placing a bottle between his knees he began his story:—
“It was a cold rainy night in January, in the year ‘98, I took my place in the Limerick mail, to go down for a few days to the west country. As the waiter of the Hibernian came to the door with a lantern, I just caught a glimpse of the other insides; none of whom were known to me, except Colonel M’Manus, that I met once in a boarding-house in Molcsworth Street. I did not, at the time, think him a very agreeable companion; but when morning broke, and we began to pay our respects to each other in the coach, I leaned over, and said, ‘I hope you’re well, Colonel M’Manus,’ just by way of civility like. He didn’t hear me at first; so that I said it again, a little louder.