Comment on this might have been difficult, but I was preserved from it by the approach across the frozen gravel of a short, red-bearded man, Mrs. Knox's gardener, wood-ranger, and ruling counsellor, John Kane. He held in his hands two large apples of arsenical hue, and, taking off his hat to me with much dignity, addressed himself to the lady of the house.
"He says he'd sooner walk barefoot to Cork than to give three and fippence for the likes of them!"
"I'm sure I've no objection if he does," responded Mrs. Knox, turning the silver bowl upside down over the scrimmaging hens and pigeons, "I daresay it would be no novelty to him."
"And isn't that what I told him!" said John Kane, his voice at once ascending to the concert pitch of altercation, "I said to him if the Lord Left'nant and the Pope was follying me around the yard of Aussolas offering three and a penny for them apples they'd not get them! Sure the nuns gave us that much for windfalls that was only fit to be making cherubs with!"
I might have been struck by the fitness, as well as the ingenuity, of this industry, but in some remote byway of my brain the remembrance woke of a "black-currant cherub" prescribed by Mrs. Cadogan for sore throats, and divined by Philippa to be a syrup. I turned away and lit a cigarette in order to conceal my feelings from John Kane, round whose red beard the smoke of battle hung almost palpably.
"What's between you?" asked his mistress sharply.
"Three and a penny he's offering, ma'am!" declaimed her deputy, "for sheeps' noses that there isn't one in the country has but yourself! And not a brown farthing more would he give!—the consecrated blagyard!"
"AND NOT A BROWN FARTHING MORE WOULD HE GIVE"