“Shure and I have lost the plaguy thing.”
“If you have lost your ticket, sah, can you remember your berth?” asked the African.
A solemn pause, during which Paddy ruminated deeply, then he exclaimed,
“Och, by jabers, it is a hard thing to remember that, though I know I was there at the time; and my ould mother, rest her bones, tould me that I was born on Patrick’s day in the morning, the year afore the famine, and more by token our old sow had a fine litter of pigs that selfsame day.”
When the burst of laughter that greeted this reply had died away, I quickly subsided into the “arms of Murphy,” and knew nothing more of railroads, railroad-law, or railroad travelling, until I was called by the descendant of Noah’s naughty son, and informed that we were just at the station which I had left some days previously, and where my journeyings were for a time to end, and from which in a few minutes I would be transported to the bosom of my beloved spouse. Right glad was I when once again I stood—mens sana in corpore sano—on the platform of the depot of my native city, and saw the cabby coming from the baggage car with my traps on his brawny shoulder. I will draw the veil of modesty over the reception that awaited me at home, and where I soon showed myself to be “a forked straddling animal with bandy legs,” as Dean Swift puts it; or as Sir John Falstaff, Knight, would say, “for all the world like a forked radish with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife.”
FOOTNOTES:
[502] Railway Act, 1868, s. 20, sub-sec. 13 (Canada).
[503] Redfield on Railways, vol. ii., p. 252.
[504] Robinson v. Cone, 22 Vt. 213; Butterfield v. Forrester, 11 East, 60.
[505] Higgins v. N. Y. & Harlem Rw., 2 Bosw. 132.