'Come, come, Joe, you have many a friend! and when you count them over, don't forget me in the reckoning.'
'Whisht, whisht!' he whispered in a low voice, as if fearful of being overheard, 'don't say that; them's dangerous words.'
I turned towards him with astonishment, and perceived that his whole countenance had undergone a striking change. The gay and laughing look was gone; the bright colour had left his cheek, and a cold, ghastly paleness was spread over his features; and as he cast a hurried and stealthy look around him, I could mark that some secret fear was working within him.
'What is it, Joe?' said I; 'what's the matter? Are you ill?'
'No,' said he, in a tone scarce audible—'no, but you frightened me just now when you called me your friend.'
'How could that frighten you, my poor fellow?'
'I 'll tell you. That's what they called my father; they said he was friendly with the gentlemen, and sign's on it.' He paused, and his eye became rooted to the ground as if on some object there from which he could not turn his gaze. 'Yes, I mind it well; we were sitting by the fire in the guard-room all alone by ourselves—the troops was away, I don't know where—when we heard the tramp of men marching, but not regular, but coming as if they didn't care how, and horses and carts rattling and rumbling among them.
'“Thim's the boys,” says my father. “Give me that ould cockade there, till I stick it in my cap; and reach me over the fiddle, till I rise a tune for them.”
'I mind little more till we was marching at the head of them through the town, down towards the new college that was building—it's Maynooth, I'm speaking about—and then we turned to the left, my father scraping away all the time every tune he thought they 'd like; and if now and then by mistake he 'd play anything that did not plaze them, they'd damn and blast him with the dreadfullest curses, and stick a pike into him, till the blood would come running down his back; and then my father would cry out—
'“I'll tell my friends on you for this—divil a lie in it, but I will”