[{16}] TO PUT HIM UP: to put him in gaol
It was a writ that villain the wine merchant had marked against my poor master for some hundreds of an old debt, which it was a shame to be talking of at such a time as this.
‘Put it in your pocket again, and think no more of it anyways for seven years to come, my honest friend,’ says I; ‘he’s a member of Parliament now, praised be God, and such as you can’t touch him: and if you’ll take a fool’s advice, I’d have you keep out of the way this day, or you’ll run a good chance of getting your deserts amongst my master’s friends, unless you choose to drink his health like everybody else.’
‘I’ve no objection to that in life,’ said he. So we went into one of the public-houses kept open for my master; and we had a great deal of talk about this thing and that. ‘And how is it,’ says he, ‘your master keeps on so well upon his legs? I heard say he was off Holantide twelvemonth past.’
‘Never was better or heartier in his life,’ said I.
‘It’s not that I’m after speaking of’ said he; ‘but there was a great report of his being ruined.’
‘No matter,’ says I, ‘the sheriffs two years running were his particular friends, and the sub-sheriffs were both of them gentlemen, and were properly spoken to; and so the writs lay snug with them, and they, as I understand by my son Jason the custom in them cases is, returned the writs as they came to them to those that sent ‘em much good may it do them!—with a word in Latin, that no such person as Sir Condy Rackrent, Bart., was to be found in those parts.’
‘Oh, I understand all those ways better—no offence—than you,’ says he, laughing, and at the same time filling his glass to my master’s good health, which convinced me he was a warm friend in his heart after all, though appearances were a little suspicious or so at first. ‘To be sure,’ says he, still cutting his joke, ‘when a man’s over head and shoulders in debt, he may live the faster for it, and the better if he goes the right way about it; or else how is it so many live on so well, as we see every day, after they are ruined?’
‘How is it,’ says I, being a little merry at the time—‘how is it but just as you see the ducks in the chicken-yard, just after their heads are cut off by the cook, running round and round faster than when alive?’
At which conceit he fell a-laughing, and remarked he had never had the happiness yet to see the chicken-yard at Castle Rackrent.