“Tis as clean as my five fingers, the same rafters,” said she with unmoved gravity.
“This is too bad—Wylie, do you hear this?” said the old gentleman, with a face dark with passion.
“Aye,” chorused in some half dozen friends of the woman—“nothing stands the wind like the thatch.”
Wylie whispered some words to his master, and by a side gesture, motioned to the woman to take her departure. The hint was at once taken, and her place immediately filled by another. This was a short little old fellow, in yellow rags, his face concealed by a handkerchief, on removing which, he discovered a countenance that bore no earthly resemblance to that of a human being: the eyes were entirely concealed by swollen masses of cheek and eye-lid—the nose might have been eight noses—and the round immense lips, and the small aperture between, looked like the opening in a ballot-box.
“Who is this?—what's the matter here?” said Sir Marmaduke, as he stared in mingled horror and astonishment at the object before him.
“Faix, ye may well ax,” said the little man, in a thick guttural voice. “Sorra one of the neighbours knew me this morning. I'm Tim M'Garrey, of the cross-roads.”
“What has happened to you then?” asked Sir Marmaduke, somewhat ruffled by the sturdy tone of the ragged fellow's address.
“'Tis your own doing, then—divil a less—you may be proud of your work.”
“My doing!—how do you dare to say so?”
“'Tis no darin' at all—'tis thrue, as I'm here. Them bloody beehives you made me take home wid me, I put them in a corner of the house, and by bad luck it was the pig's corner, and, sorra bit, but she rooted them out, and upset them, and with that, the varmint fell upon us all, and it was two hours before we killed them—divil such a fight ever ye seen: Peggy had the beetle, and I the griddle, for flattening them agin the wall, and maybe we didn't work hard, while the childer was roarin' and bawlin' for the bare life.”