'Do you like a belle or beldame best, Sir Launcelot?' enquired Miss Mag, with a mild little duck to Puddock.
'You'll have your hands pretty full, Sir, ha, ha, ha!' and with scarlet cheeks, and a choking laugh, away sailed Aunt Rebecca.
'Choke, chicken, there's more a-hatching,' said Miss Mag, in a sort of aside, and cutting a flic-flac with a merry devilish laugh, and a wink to Puddock. That officer, being a gentleman, was a good deal disconcerted, and scandalised—too literal to see, and too honest to enjoy, the absurd side of the combat.
'Twas an affair of a few seconds, like two frigates crossing in a gale, with only opportunity for a broadside or two; and when the Rebecca Chattesworth sheered off, it can't be denied, her tackling was a good deal more cut up, and her hull considerably more pierced, than those of the saucy Magnolia, who sent that whistling shot and provoking cheer in her majestic wake.
'I see you want to go, Lieutenant Puddock—Lieutenant O'Flaherty, I promised to dance this country dance with you; don't let me keep you, Ensign Puddock,' said Miss Mag in a huff, observing little Puddock's wandering eye and thoughts.
'I—a—you see, Miss Macnamara, truly you were so hard upon poor Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, that I fear I shall get into trouble, unless I go and make my peace with her,' lisped the little lieutenant, speaking the truth, as was his wont, with a bow and a polite smile, and a gentle indication of beginning to move away.
'Oh, is that all? I was afraid you were sick of the mulligrubs, with eating chopt hay; you had better go back to her at once if she wants you, for if you don't with a good grace, she'll very likely come and take you back by the collar,' and Miss Mag and O'Flaherty joined in a derisive hee-haw, to Puddock's considerable confusion, who bowed and smiled again, and tried to laugh, till the charming couple relieved him by taking their places in the dance.
When I read this speech about the 'mulligrubs,' in the old yellow letter which contains a lively account of the skirmish, my breath was fairly taken away, and I could see nothing else for more than a minute; and so soon as I was quite myself again, I struck my revising pen across the monstrous sentence, with uncompromising decision, referring it to a clerical blunder, or some unlucky transposition, and I wondered how any polite person could have made so gross a slip. But see how authentication waits upon truth! Three years afterwards, I picked up in the parlour of the 'Cat and Fiddle,' on the Macclesfield Road, in Derbyshire, a scrubby old duodecimo, which turned out to be an old volume of Dean Swift's works: well, I opened in the middle of 'Polite Conversation,' and there, upon my honour, the second sentence I read was 'Lady Smart,' (mark that—'Lady!') 'What, you are sick of the mulligrubs, with eating chopt hay?' So my good old yellow letter-writer ('I.' or 'T.' Tresham, I can't decide what he signs himself)—you were, no doubt, exact here as in other matters, and I was determining the probable and the impossible, unphilosophically, by the rule of my own time. And my poor Magnolia, though you spoke some years—thirty or so—later than my Lady Smart, a countess for aught I know, you are not so much to blame. Thirty years! what of that? Don't we, to this hour, more especially in rural districts, encounter among the old folk, every now and then, one of honest Simon Wagstaff's pleasantries, which had served merry ladies and gentlemen so long before that charming compiler, with his 'Large Table Book,' took the matter in hands. And I feel, I confess, a queer sort of a thrill, not at all contemptuous—neither altogether sad, nor altogether joyous—but something pleasantly regretful, whenever one of those quaint and faded old servants of the mirth of so many dead and buried generations, turns up in my company.
And now the sun went down behind the tufted trees, and the blue shades of evening began to deepen, and the merry company flocked into the King's House, to dance again and drink tea, and make more love, and play round games, and joke, and sing songs, and eat supper under old Colonel Stafford's snug and kindly roof-tree.
Dangerfield, who arrived rather late, was now in high chat with Aunt Becky. She rather liked him and had very graciously accepted a gray parrot and a monkey, which he had deferentially presented, a step which called forth, to General Chattesworth's consternation, a cockatoo from Cluffe, who felt the necessity of maintaining his ground against the stranger, and wrote off by the next packet to London, in a confounded passion, for he hated wasting money, about a pelican he had got wind of. Dangerfield also entered with much apparent interest into a favourite scheme of Aunt Becky's, for establishing, between Chapelizod and Knockmaroon, a sort of retreat for discharged gaol-birds of her selection, a colony, happily for the character and the silver spoons of the neighbourhood, never eventually established.