'And what do you call my mother there?' said he, with indignant energy.
'Don't bate Corny, sir! don't strike the child!' screamed the old woman, in an accent of heart-rending terror. 'Sure he doesn't know what he is saying.'
'He is telling me it isn't the Grand Canal Hotel, mother,' shouted Corny in the old lady's ears, while at the same moment he burst into a fit of the most discordant laughter. By some strange sympathy the old woman joined in, and I myself, unable to resist the ludicrous effect of a scene which still had touched my feelings, gave way also, and thus we all three laughed on for several minutes.
Suddenly recovering himself in the midst of his cachin-nations, Corny turned briskly round, fixed his fiery eyes upon me, and said—
'And did you come all the way from town to laugh at my mother and me?'
I hastened to exonerate myself from such a charge, and in a few words informed him of the object of my journey, whither I was going, and under what painful delusion I laboured, in supposing the internal arrangements of the Grand Canal Hotel bore any relation to its imposing exterior.
'I thought I could have dined here?'
'No, you can't,' was the reply, 'av ye're not fond of herrins.'
'And had a bed too?'
'Nor that either, av ye don't like straw.'