"Yes, Sir," said Fleda with quivering lips, "but not the one you know an older man."
"Ah!" said the doctor, intelligently, "Mr. Rossitur speaking of hands I have employed the Irish very much of late years they are as good as one can have, if you do not want a head."
"That is to say if you have a head," said Thorn.
"Exactly!" said the doctor, all abroad "and when there are not too many of them together. I had enough of that, Sir, some years ago, when a multitude of them were employed on the public works. The Irish were in a state of mutilation, Sir, all through the country."
"Ah!" said Thorn, "had the military been at work upon them?"
"No, Sir, but I wish they had, I am sure; it would have been for the peace of the town. There were hundreds of them. We were in want of an army."
"Of surgeons, I should think," said Thorn.
Fleda saw the doctor's dubious air and her uncle's compressed lips; and, commanding herself, with even a look of something like displeasure, she quitted her seat by Mr. Thorn, and called the doctor to the window to look at a cluster of rose acacias just then in their glory. He admired, and she expatiated, till she hoped everybody but herself had forgotten what they had been talking about. But they had no sooner returned to their seats than Thorn began again.
"The Irish in your town are not in the same mutilated state now, I suppose, Sir?"
"No, Sir, no," said the doctor: "there are much fewer of them to break each other's bones. It was all among themselves, Sir."