After the banquet, Frank caused us to be rowed in triumph over the scene of his victory, sitting in the stern with an enormous regalia, and surveying the waters with a grand complacency, which made me feel myself quite contemptible. Very different would my sensations have been, had I been then acquainted with the fact, which my friend subsequently revealed to me, that he had hooked and lost two much finer fish than that on which we dined.
The boatmen—one of whom, from his sapient and solemn manner, had the sobriquet of Lord Bacon; and the other, a fine, cheery young fellow, wearing his rightful appellation of Johnny Joyce—joined us in our tobacco and talk, “turning to mirth all things of earth, as only” Irishmen can. When two of the visitors came out of the inn, lingered a few seconds in conversation at the gate, and then started for their evening walk, in opposite directions, as Englishmen are wont,—“Bedad,” said my Lord Bacon, “the gentlemen have quarrelled, more's the pity. Sure, one of 'em has been ating the biggest dinner, and made the other jealous. That's the jealous one,” he continued, pointing to our friend Balder the Beautiful, “there's something in the set of his back, which says that he is disappointed.” And there really was a misanthropic expression, to be observed upon the shoulders in question, which we might not otherwise have noticed, but which was immediately patent to an Irishman, who detects more quickly, and ridicules more cleverly, though he cannot despise more heartily than we do, any exposition of a sulky temperament. I remember going to a horse-fair with Paddy O'Hara, of Merton, and that we overtook on the road an agriculturist of a staid and sullen deportment. He was riding by a rustic groom who led a handsome, but somewhat heavy-looking horse, too good for harness, but scarcely good enough for hunting, though the farmer evidently regarded him as quite the animal for High Leicestershire. Well, we pulled up the tandem, that we might examine the tit (thinking ourselves amazingly knowing in horse-flesh, as undergraduates do), and O'Hara led off with a “Good morning!”
“Good morning,” replied Agricola, but very sternly.
“It's lonely your horse is looking this morning, sir,” continued Pat, as serious as a mute.
“Don't know what you mean,” said the farmer.
“Oh, sure,” replied O'Hara, with an expression of intense grief, as though his heart bled for the poor quadruped, “it's desolate, and melancholy, and beraved he's looking, and very, very lonely—without the plough!”
And he blew such a blast upon our long horn, as made the welkin ring; and the big horse, he pranced and reared, and the farmer and his man they blasphemed in unison, as we sped merrily onwards.
As we had some thoughts of spending a day at a place in this neighbourhood called Coolna Carton, we asked Johnny Joyce if there was much to see there. And the answer which we got was “Divil a taste!”
“But surely,” we remonstrated, “there is wild mountain and lake scenery?”
“Oh, faith,” said Johnny, “there's mountains and sthrames, if it's the likes o' them that ye're wanting;” and he looked at us, as though he would have added, “but you, surely, cannot be such fools!”