"In the wagon."
"Yerra, they're not Christians at all, at all."
Then the men slowly opened the door of the wagon, and took out, from a mass of canvas and straw, a dainty satin-covered chair. A tidy, well dressed servant, with a lace cap perched on the top of her head, and what the village folk called "sthramers" flying behind, came out of Father Letheby's cottage, and helped to take the furniture within. As each pretty article appeared, there was a chorus of "oh-h-hs" from the children. But the climax of delight was reached when a gilt mirror appeared. Then for the first time sundry boys and girls saw their own dear smutty faces; and huge was their delight. But I am wrong. The climax came when the heaviest article appeared. Great was the curiosity.
"What is it? what is it?" "A bed?" "No." "A dresser?" "No." "A thing for books?" "No."
But one enlightened individual, who had been up to the great house at a spring cleaning, astonished the natives by declaring that it was a piano.
"A pianney? Yeh, for what? A priest with a pianney! Yerra, his niece is going to live wid him. Yerra, no! He'll play it himself."
Which last interpretation was received with shouts of incredulous laughter. What a versatile people we are! And how adoration and laughter, and reverence and sarcasm, move side by side in our character, apparently on good terms with each other. Will the time come when the laughter and the wit, grown rampant, will rudely jostle aside all the reverential elements in our nature, and mount upwards to those fatal heights which other nations have scaled like Satan,—and thence have been flung into the abyss?
I was curious to know what Hannah thought of it all. Hannah too is versatile; and leaps from adoration to envy with wonderful facility.
"Father Letheby's furniture, I suppose?" I said, when she brought in the dinner.
"I believe so," she replied, in a tone of ineffable scorn,—"a parcel of gimcracks and kimmeens."