“You’ve raised the lady’s dander,” said I.
“Which I shouldn’t have done,” said he, “for her penny is as good to me as another’s; and then she needs the mustard for the outside of her son’s throat, not the in.”
To which sentiment I agreed, even with a little sympathy for the feelings of a mother, whose penny for a blister for her son’s throat was just the tribute which she could ill spare paid from a mother’s affection to old Æsculapius. I confess to having been somewhat amused by Biddy’s Irish vindication of the rights of her family, but having been merely amused, the interlude passed out of my mind—so completely so, that by the next morning I was thinking of something very different from Mrs Riddel and her invalid son, Willie, with the sore throat.
Next day I was passing the mouth of the Fountain Close, and whom did I see standing there, with a pipe in his mouth, but Bill himself, arrayed in his suit of black, with face of the same, indicating that he had been at work in the morning? He was quite well known to me, and from a circumstance which will appear ludicrous. I had occasion at one time to separate him from a baker with whom he had quarrelled, and with whom, also, he had fought so long that the two had so mixed colours that you couldn’t have told which was the man of the oven or the man of the chimney; but the truth is, that he had more to answer for than thrashing a baker, for he was an old offender in another way, where he took without giving something more than dust. Of course it was a mystery to me how he had so soon recovered from his sore throat, and the effects of the “raal Durham.”
“Well, Bill, how’s your throat, lad?” said I, going up to him.
“My throat?” replied he; “nothing’s wrong with it—never had a sore throat in my life.”
“Except once,” said I.
“When?”
“When I took you by it rather roughly,” said I.
“Unpleasant recollection,” said the rogue. “Don’t wish it mentioned. Steady now,—nothing but lum-sweeping and small pay.”