Lurigedan was hardly "on his own doorstep," and Mr. Quinn himself only knew of it because he had once, very breathlessly, climbed to its summit, but an Irish hill was of more consequence to him than the highest mountain in the world; and so he descended upon the master of the school, a dreepy individual with a tendency to lament the errors of Rome, and damned him from tip to toe so effectually that the alarmed pedagogue gladly consented to the immediate termination of Henry's career at his establishment. Thereafter, Henry was educated in England, for Mr. Quinn did not propose to sacrifice efficiency to patriotism.
"An' if you come back talkin' like a damned Cockney," he said to his son as he bade good-bye to him, "I'll cut the legs off you!"
When Henry came home in the holidays, Mr. Quinn would spend hours in testing his tongue.
"Sound your rs," he would say repeatedly, because he regarded one's ability to say the letter r as a test of a man's control of the English language. "If you were to listen to an Englishman talkin' on the telephone, you'd hear him yelpin' 'Ah yoh thah?' just like a big buck nigger, 'til you'd be sick o' listenin' to him! Say, 'Are you there?', Henry son!"
And Henry would say "Are you there, father?" very gravely.
"That's right," the old man would exclaim, listening with delight to the rolling rs. "Always sound your rs whatever you do. I'll not own you if you come home sayin,'Ah yoh thah?' when you mean 'Are you there?' Do you mind me, now?"
"Yes, father."
"Well, be heedin' me, then! Now, how are you on the hs. Are you as steady on them as you were when you were home before?"
Then Henry would protest. "But, father," he would say, "they don't all drop their hs. It's only the common ones that drop them!...
"They're all common, Henry ... the whole lot, common as dirt!" Mr. Quinn retorted once to that, and then began to tell his son how the English people had lost the habits and instincts of gentlemen in the eighteenth century ... "where Ireland still is, my son!" ... and had become money-grubbers. "The English," he said, lying back in his chair and delivering his sentences as if he were a monarch pronouncing decrees, "ceased to be gentlemen on the day that Hargreaves invented the spinnin'-jenny, and landlords gave way to mill-owners." He stopped for a second or two and then continued as if an idea had only just come into his head. "An' it was proper punishment for Hargreaves," he said, "that the English let him die in the workhouse. Proper punishment. What the hell did he want to invent the thing for?..."