The young lady replied sympathetically that toothache was a fright.
"Well, indeed, that's true," said James, smoothly entering the conversation from behind my chair. "I got my own share of it. Sure there was one time I used to be roaring like a Banshee all night with it."
"Were you so?" said the gentleman, with a wink at me. "That must have been a long time ago, James."
"Well, indeed, it is too, Doctor," replied James meditatively, "going on forty years, I daresay. I went to Dublin, and I went to a great dentist that was in it that time, and he pulled all the teeth I had, and he gave me a new set entirely."
"Oh, my!" said the young lady, "that must have been very expensive."
"It was so," said James, not without pride. "Twenty pounds I gave him."
"That was awful," said the young lady, feelingly; "it was well to be you that had it to spend."
"Well, it wasn't all out so bad," said James; "sure I only wore them a few times—I wouldn't be bothered with them, and a doctor that was a friend of mine gave me ten pounds for them."
"I suppose they were a fit for a patient of his?" said the doctor.
"They were a bad fit for me, anyway," returned James, glancing over his shoulder at the clattering operations of his two female subordinates, with the eye of the sergeant-major—the eye that always contains a grievance. "I was a footman with the old Lord Garretmore that time. Sure that was where the chandelier came from. A grand house it was, too—big slobs of marble on the tables, and gold legs under them, and ye'd bog to the knees in the carpets. Well, it was the first night after me getting the teeth, there was a gentleman stayed for dinner, and he was to go away by the night train. Forty horses were in the stables, and there wasn't one but was out at grass, and I had to go out beating the bushes for an old mare that was round the house always, herself and her foal, to put her under the side car. 'Prua! Prua!' says I, calling the mare in the dark, and with that the teeth lepped out of my mouth, with respects to you!"