“Father Luke was a smart little man then himself, and had a nate leg and foot.”
“Killarney was a fine place I'm tould,” said Kerry, with a dexterous shift to change the topic. “I wasn't often there myself, but I heerd it was the iligant fair entirely.”
“So it was,” said Mrs. Branagan; “there never was the kind of sport and divarsion wasn't there. It begun on a Monday and went through the week; and short enough the time was. There was dancing, and fighting, and singing, and 'stations,' up to Aghadoe and down again on the bare knees, and a pilgrimage to the holy well—three times round that, maybe after a jig two hours long; and there was a dwarf that tould fortunes, and a friar that sould gospels agin fever, and fallin' sickness, and ballad-singers, and play-actors. Musha, there never was the like of it;” and in this strain did, she pour forth a flood of impassioned eloquence on the recollection of those carnal pleasures and enjoyments which, but a few minutes before, she had condemned so rigidly in others, nor was it till at the very close of her speech that she suddenly perceived how she had wandered from her text; then with a heavy groan she muttered—“Ayeh! we're sinful craytures, the best of us.”
Kerry responded to the sentiment with a fac-simile sigh, and the peace was ratified.
“You wouldn't believe now what Miss Kate is bringing over with her—faix, you wouldn't believe it.”
“Maybe a monkey,” said Mrs. Branagan, who had a vague notion that France lay somewhere within the tropics.
“Worse nor that.”
“Is it a bear?” asked she again.
“No, but a French maid, to dress her hair, and powder her, and put patches on her face.”
“Whisht, I tell you,” cried Mrs. Branagan, “and don't be talking that way. Miss Kate was never the one to turn to the likes of them things.”