“Now, that’s mighty clever,” said Grady. “Will you tell me something, Kavanagh, you that’s a real scholar now—can a man be two things at the same time?”
“Of course he can; he can be an Irishman and a barge horse, you see.”
“Ah, then a Mounted Infantry man can be a trooper and a foot soldier all at once. And a camel rider, would you call him a horse soldier, now?”
“No, Pat, I could not afford it. I’m an Irishman as well as yourself, and dull people would think it was a blunder.”
“That’s a true word,” said Grady. “And have you not noticed now, when folks laugh at an Irishman, he is mostly quite right if they had the understanding? Now you have observed, and heard, what a bad country Egypt is for the eyes. Sure they give us green goggles, or we should get the—what do you call it, Mr Corporal, sir, if you plaze?”
“The hop-fallimy,” replied Corporal Adams, proud of being appealed to.
“Thank you; the hop-family, what with the sun, and the sand, and the flies. And if you get the hop-family you are likely to go blind, and that is a bad thing. Is it not curious that the great river of a country that is so bad for the eyes should have cataracts itself in it? Now that would sound foolish to many people, but you, who are an Irishman, see the bearings of it, don’t you now?”
“But,” observed Macintosh, “a cataract in the eye is a skin, or something growing over it, and a cataract in the river is a kind of waterfall. They are not the same sort of thing at all.”
“And is that so? To be sure, now, what a stupid mistake then I made. And did you ever undergo the operation, now, Macintosh?”
“Well, beyond vaccination and the lugging out of a broken tooth, I don’t call to mind that I have been in the surgeon’s hands; and if ye want to know the truth, I don’t care if I never am. Eh, but that tooth now, it took a tug!”