“‘You never told me to do so,’ ses Garret. ‘And if I did start it without your permission, I might have been sent to gaol for five hundred years or more.’
“‘Well,’ ses the Judge, ‘I’m sorry I can’t send you to a warmer place than gaol to punish you for fooling me in such a successful manner. Why, man alive,’ ses he, ‘your conduct is preposterous; in fact, ’tis worse, because ’tis ridiculous as well.’
“‘’Tis the incongruity of things that makes a living for most of us,’ ses Garret. ‘And only a fool would get angry about anything. Anyway,’ ses he, ‘I don’t care a traneen what happens to you, so long as I will get what is coming to me.’
“‘Bedad,’ ses the Judge, ‘in spite of all our old talk, that seems to be the beginning and end of human ambition. We all like to get as much as we can for nothing, and give as little as possible in return.’
“But to finish my story, the case was taken from the high courts to the low courts, and from the low courts back again to the high courts, and between the jigs and the reels, so to speak, Garret got his money, and Patcheen the Piper never asked any one to stop a mill again.”
“That’s the devil’s own queer yarn,” said Padna. “If we all had to wait until we were told what to do, we wouldn’t do anything at all.”
Shauno and the Shah
“Well,” said Padna to his friend Micus, as they sat on a donkey cart on their way to market, “I wonder if you ever heard tell of Shauno the Rover.”