"Look at O'Grady. There he is, much worse off than I am, as he has no one to make any particular fuss about him. He is getting on capitally and, indeed, stumped about the deck so much, coming home, that the captain begged him to have a pad of leather put on to the bottom of his leg, to save the decks. O'Grady is a philosopher, and I shall try to follow his example."
"Why should one bother oneself, Miss O'Connor, when bothering won't help? When the war is over, I shall buy Tim Doolan, my soldier servant, out. He is a vile, drunken villain; but I understand him, and he understands me, and he blubbered so, when he carried me off the field, that I had to promise him that, if a French bullet did not carry him off, I would send for him when the war was over.
"'You know you can't do without me, yer honour,' the scoundrel said.
"'I can do better without you than with you, Tim,' says I. 'Ye are always getting me into trouble, with your drunken ways. Ye would have been flogged a dozen times, if I hadn't screened you. Take up your musket and join your regiment. You rascal, you are smelling of drink now, and divil a drop, except water, is there in me flask.'
"'I did it for your own good,' says he. 'Ye know that spirits always heats your blood, and water would be the best for you, when the fighting began; so I just sacrificed meself.
"'For,' says I to meself, 'if ye get fighting a little wild, Tim, it don't matter a bit; but the captain will have to keep cool, so it is best that you should drink up the spirits, and fill the flask up with water to quench his thirst.'"
"'Be off, ye black villain,' I said, 'or I will strike you.'
"'You will never be able to do without me, Captain,' says he, picking up his musket; and with that he trudged away and, for aught I know, he never came out of the battle alive."
The others laughed.
"They were always quarrelling, Mary," Terence said. "But I agree with Tim that his master will find it very hard to do without him, especially about one o'clock in the morning."