“Begorra, he might guess that anyhow!” muttered a shrewd little tailor, with a significance that provoked hearty laughter.
“And now,” continued Billy, with an air of triumph, “we'll proceed to the next point.”
“Ye needn't trouble yerself then,” said Terry Lynch, “for Peter has gone home.”
And so, to the amusement of the meeting, it turned out to be the case; the sacristan had retired from the controversy. “Come in here to Mrs. Moore's, Billy, and take a glass with us,” said Terry; “it isn't often we see you in these parts.”
“If the honorable company will graciously vouchsafe and condescind to let me trate them to a half-gallon,” said Billy, “it will be the proudest event of my terrestrial existence.”
The proposition was received with a cordial enthusiasm, flattering to all concerned; and in a few minutes after, Billy Traynor sat at the head of a long table in the neat parlor of “The Griddle,” with a company of some fifteen or sixteen very convivially disposed friends around him.
“If I was Cæsar, or Lucretius, or Nebuchadnezzar, I couldn't be prouder,” said Billy, as he looked down the board. “And let moralists talk as they will, there's a beautiful expansion of sentiment, there's a fine genial overflowin' of the heart, in gatherin's like this, where we mingle our feelin's and our philosophy; and our love and our learning walk hand in hand like brothers—pass the sperits, Mr. Shea. If we look to the ancient writers, what do we see!—Lemons! bring in some lemons, Mickey.—What do we see, I say, but that the very highest enjoyment of the haythen gods was—Hot wather! why won't they send in more hot wather?”
“Begorra, if I was a haythen god, I 'd like a little whisky in it,” muttered Terry, dryly.
“Where was I?” asked Billy, a little disconcerted by this sally, and the laugh it excited. “I was expatiatin' upon celestial convivialities. The nodes coenoeque deum,—them elegant hospitalities where wisdom was moistened with nectar, and wit washed down with ambrosia. It is not, by coorse, to be expected,” continued he, modestly, “that we mere mortials can compete with them elegant refections. But, as Ovid says, we can at least diem jucundam decipere.”
The unknown tongue had now restored to Billy all the reverence and respect of his auditory, and he continued to expatiate very eloquently on the wholesome advantages to be derived from convivial intercourse, both amongst gods and men; rather slyly intimating that either on the score of the fluids, or the conversation, his own leanings lay towards “the humanities.”