“Give us your notions,” came several voices from around the table.
“She bragged of her respectability; of her armour of virtue, Daly told us. Well, suppose we put a decent coat on Dionysius Hogan and send him to propose an elopement to her to-morrow; how would that do for a joke when it gets around the town?”
“By the powers, boys, whether or not Dionysius gets kicked down the stairs, she'll be the laughing-stock of the town. It's a genius”—he pronounced it “jan-yus”—“that you are, Jimmy, and no mistake,” cried young Moriarty.
“We'll talk it over,” said Jimmy. And they did talk it over.
II
Dionysius Hogan was a celebrated character in Dublin during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The Irish capital has always cherished curious characters, for pretty much the same reason that caused badgers to be preserved; any man, or, for that matter, any woman, who was only eccentric enough, could depend on the patronage of the people of Dublin. Dionysius Hogan afforded his fellow-citizens many a laugh on account of his numerous eccentricities. He was a man of about fifty years of age, but his great anxiety was to appear thirty years younger; and he fancied he accomplished this aim by wearing in 1783 the costume of 1750, only in an exaggerated form. His chief hallucination was that several of the best known ladies in society were in love with him, and that it was necessary for him to be very careful lest he should compromise himself by a correspondence with some of those who had husbands.
It need scarcely be said that this idea of his was not greatly discouraged by the undergraduates of Trinity College. It was not their fault if he did not receive every week a letter from some distinguished lady begging the favor of an interview with him. Upon many occasions the communications, which purported to come from married ladies, took the form of verses. These he exhibited with great pride, and only after extorting promises of profound secrecy, to his student friends.