He had a rare brogue and a governing nasal drone, but it was the brogue that emboldened me to ask for whisky.
“Spirits!” said he; “not a drop, an’ niver have; but jist sit ye where ye are, an’ I’ll fetch ye out some beer—Bass’s, no less, av ye’ll thry that; and can dhrink from the bottle.”
He talked in jerks, and had a quaint knack of chucking remarks after an apparently completed sentence, evidently intending them to catch up to it and be tacked on. He dived under the bed somewhere, and a minute later I heard the squeaking of a corkscrew and the popping of a cork.
“Here y’ are,” said he, as he pressed the bottle into my two hands; “drink hearty, me lad, and praise yer God Dan O’Connell there’s got too fat an’ lazy to pull ye down.”
I dare say he knew what he was talking about, but, for my part, I confess that nothing in the whole business had impressed me less than any lack of earnestness on Dan O’Connell’s part. I sat awhile munching biscuits from a tin which he had placed on the table and gurgling down beer from the bottle. Cassidy was asleep. Ten minutes passed, and I was finishing the beer, when he sat up again, as I judged from the sound, and remarked in a brisk, clear tone:
“Ye called me a mud-dollopin’, dyke-diggin’, Amsterdam’d Dutchman! Ye’ll take back the Dutchman, I believe?”
“I will indeed,” I said, laughing.
“An’ the mud?”
“Yes, and the mud.”
He settled himself in the bunk again with a grunt, and murmured in a tone of indignant contempt: