“‘You must hurry up then,’ ses I.
“‘The man who stands here before you,’ ses he, ‘is no less a person than His Lordship the Mayor of Loughlaurna.’
“‘That’s a giant of a title for a bit of a man like yourself,’ ses I. ‘But how came the likes of you to be Mayor of Loughlaurna?’
“‘What way would any one become mayor of a city, unless by his ability to control others, or the ability of others to control him? Many a man got a good job because he knew how to hold his tongue,’ ses he.
“‘Bedad,’ ses I, ‘honesty must have gone on a holiday the day that gold was discovered, and never returned.’
“‘Wisha, God help you for a poor fool to think that honesty ever existed. Honesty is like the gift of silence among women,—it only exists, so to speak, after death. But now to my history. I suppose you often heard tell of a song that the tinkers sing in public houses on Saturday nights. It goes like this:
”On Lough Neagh’s bank, as the fisherman strays,
When the clear cool eve’s declining,
He sees the round towers of other days
In the waters beneath him shining.”’