“You haven't a notion; nor what he is?”
“Not the slightest. I think, indeed, he said he was in the army; but I'm not clear it wasn't a commissary or a surgeon; maybe he was, but he knows a little about everything. Take him on naval matters, and he understands them well; ask him about foreign countries,—egad, he was everywhere. Ireland seems the only place new to him, and it won't be so long; for he goes among the people, and talks to them, and hears all they have to say, with a patience that breaks my heart. Like all strangers, he's astonished with the acuteness he meets with, and never ceases saying, 'Ain't they a wonderful people? Who ever saw their equal for intelligence?'”
“Bother!” said Scanlan, contemptuously.
“But it is not bother! Maurice; he's right. They are just what he says.”
“Arrah! don't be humbugging me, Mr. Crow,” said the other. “They 're a set of scheming, plotting vagabonds, that are unmanageable by any one, except a fellow that has the key to them as I have.”
“You know them, that's true,” said Crow, half apologetically, for he liked the port, and did not feel he ought to push contradiction too far.
“And that's more than your friend Barry does, or ever will,” said Scanlan. “I defy an Englishman—I don't care how shrewd he is—to understand Paddy.”
A slight movement on Mr. Merl's part here admonished the speaker to speak lower.
“Ay,” continued Maurice, “that fellow there—whoever he is or whatever he is—is no fool! he 's deep enough; and yet there 's not a bare-legged gossoon on the estate I won't back to take him in.”
“But Barry's another kind of man entirely. You wouldn't call him cute or cunning; but he's a sensible, well-judging man, that has seen a deal of life.”