“He was a moighty polite man was Professor Lancett. Terence an’ I both agrayed on his sayin’ this, an’ thought our fortunes were made an’ we’d git our diplomas at once, without any examination, sure!
“But his nixt remark purty soon took the consate out of both of us.
“‘It’s lucky for you two dunder-headed ignoramases!’ he went on to say in a nasty sneerin’ way the baste had with him whin he was angry and was any way put out. ‘Preshous lucky for you, Misther Terence Mahony, an’ you, too, Garry O’Neil, that I chanced to come afther you, thinkin’ ye’d be up to some mischief, or else ye’d have put your foot in it with a vengeance an’ murthered between you this poor, harmless ould woman lying here. I am ashamed and disgusted with you!’
“He thin prosayded to till what the poor crayture was sufferin’ from, an’ what d’ye think her complaint was, colonel? Jist give a guess, now, jist to oblige me, sure.”
“Great Scot!” cried the American, smiling at O’Neil’s naïve manner and the happy and roguish expression on his face, our guest’s appearance having been much improved by the food of which he had partaken as well as the stimulant, which had put some little colour into his pale cheeks. “I’m sure I can’t guess. But what was it, sir, for you have excited my curiosity?”
Chapter Eighteen.
A Black Business.
“Be jabers, sor!” exclaimed the Irishman in his very broadest brogue and with a comical grin on his face that certainly must have eclipsed that of which he complained in the professor of his college who had caught him and his fellow-student trespassing on his medical preserves. “To till the truth an’ shame the divvle, colonel, the poor ould crayture, whose complaint we couldn’t underconstumble at all at all, sure, was sufferin’ from a fit of apoplexy—a thing aisy enough to recognise by any docther of experience, though, faith, it moight have been Grake to us!”