Scene, as before.
Frank, (aroused by renewed knocking) Now then! what the deuce is up?
Boots. There's another man, yer 'onour, wants to sell you a hagle.
Frank. Oh, hang it! Tell him I've got one, and ask the gentleman in Number Twenty whether he would like to buy it.
Boots. I will, yer 'onour.
Boots. (Returning after a putative intervieiv with No. 20.) Plaze, yer 'onour, the gintleman's bin and bought him, and I was to give his best love to yer 'onour, and his hagle's waiting in the passage, to fight yer 'onour's hagle for a new hat.
During this latter sentence, my voice, I regret to say, went back to its ordinary tone; Frank was out of bed in an instant; and I had only just time to regain No. 20, when a heavy boot went by with great velocity, falling, as Frank afterwards told me, at the feet of an astonished elderly clergyman, who, coming out of his room at that instant, and seeing my friend in his cuttysark, evidently inferred an escape from the asylum, and bolted immediately, self and door.
But sure enough, when we came down to breakfast, there was a veritable eagle at the door of the hotel, wild with anger, in an iron cage, and the property of a small tourist, who was starting for Connamara with this delectable companion, a large Arbutus table, ditto case of Killarney ferns, and a hillock of general luggage. With these impedi-menta, his estates appeared to be sufficiently in-cumbered, and I was not surprised that he declined to purchase a shillelagh, 1 with a head about the size of his own, although solemnly assured that “it had been cut in the dark moon”—an inestimable advantage doubtless, though to me the meaning of the sentence is as obscure as the luminary in question.