“Faith, colonel,” cried the Irishman, laughing in his usual good-tempered racy manner, “you’d best spake well of the craft or I’ll be afther payin’ you out, sure, alannah, whin I get your leg in me grip! Jist you stow some more o’ that illigint soup inside your belt, sor, before I start on the job, an’ while ye’re aitin’ I’ll tell you how I once sarved out an old woman whom I was called in to docther, whin I was at ould Trinity, larnin’ the profession, in faith!”
“That’s right, O’Neil,” said the skipper, seeing his motive in trying to set our sad guest at his ease and to try and distract his thoughts from the awful anxiety and grief under which he was labouring. “Have I heard the yarn before, eh?”
“Faith, not that I know of, cap’en,” returned the doctor pro tem in his free and easy manner. “Begorrah, the joke’s too much ag’inst meself, sor, for me to be afther tillin’ the story too often!”
“Never mind that; it will make it all the more interesting to us,” said the skipper with a knowing wink to Mr Stokes, both of them knowing Garry’s old stories only too well, but at such a time as this they would have listened to anything if it would only serve to distract the poor colonel’s thoughts for a few minutes, and they chuckled in recollection of the many jokes against himself that Garry had perpetrated. “Fire away with your yarn.”
“Bedad, then, here goes,” began O’Neil with a grin. “Ye must know, colonel, if you will have it, that I was only a ‘sucking sawbones,’ so to spake, at the toime. Faith, I was a medical studint in my first year, having barely mastered the bones.”
“The bones!” interrupted the skipper. “What the deuce do you mean, man?”
“Sure, the inthroductory study of anatomy, sor,” explained Garry rather grandiloquently, going on with his yarn. “Well, one foine day whin I an’ another fellow who’d kept the same terms as mesilf were walking the hospital, wonderin’ whin we’d be able to pass the college, sure the hall porter comes into the ward we were in an’ axes if we knew where Professor Lancett, the house surgeon, was to be found, as he was wanted at once.
“‘Faix,’ says Terence Mahony, my chum, the other medical studint who was with me. ‘He’s gone to say the Lord Lieutenant, who’s been struck down with the maysles, an’ the divvle only knows whin he’ll get back from the castle, sure! What’s the matter, O’Dowd? Who wants ould Lancett at this outlandish toime of day?’
“The hall porter took Mahony’s chaff, faith, in all sober sayriousness. ‘It’s moighty sorry I am,’ says he; ‘Master Lancett’s gone to the castle, though proud I am for ould Trinity’s sake, sayin’ as how the Lord Lieutenant has for to send to us, sure, bekase them murtheren’ ’sassa docthers that he brought from over the say with him from Inkland ain’t a patch on our chaps! But, faix, sor, a poor woman as the professor knows is took moighty bad in her inside, some of her neighbours says, an’ wants help at onst!’
“‘Who is it, O’Dowd?’ I asks. ‘Do you know where she lives?’