“Now, your honour, though ’twas much to drink with a man that was drowned seven years before, in the ford of Ah-na-fourish, facing his own door, yet the glass was hard to be withstood—to say nothing of the fire that was blazing within—for the night was mortal cold. So tying Modderaroo to the hasp of the door—if I don’t love the creature as I love my own life—I went in with Jack Myers.
“Civil enough he was—I’ll never say otherwise to my dying hour—for he handed me a stool by the fire, and bid me sit down and make myself comfortable. But his face, as I said before, was as white as the snow on the hills, and his two eyes fell dead on me, like the eyes of a cod without any life in them. Just as I was going to put the glass to my lips, a voice—’twas the same that I heard bidding the door be opened—spoke out of a cupboard that was convenient to the left-hand side of the chimney, and said, ‘Have you any news for me, Ned Sheehy?’
“‘The never a word, sir,’ says I, making answer before I tasted the whisky, all out of civility; and, to speak the truth, never the least could I remember at that moment of what had happened to me, or how I got there; for I was quite bothered with the fright.
“‘Have you no news,’ says the voice, ‘Ned, to tell me, from Mountbally Gumbletonmore; or from the Mill; or about Moll Trantum that was married last week to Bryan Oge, and you at the wedding?’
“‘No, sir,’ says I, ‘never the word.’
“‘What brought you in here, Ned, then?’ says the voice. I could say nothing; for, whatever other people might do, I never could frame an excuse; and I was loath to say it was on account of the glass and the fire, for that would be to speak the truth.
“‘Turn the scoundrel out,’ says the voice; and at the sound of it, who would I see but Jack Myers making over to me with a lump of a stick in his hand, and it clenched on the stick so wicked. For certain, I did not stop to feel the weight of the blow; so, dropping the glass, and it full of the stuff too, I bolted out of the door, and never rested from running away, for as good, I believe, as twenty miles, till I found myself in a big wood.
“‘The Lord preserve me! what will become of me now!’ says I. ‘Oh, Ned Sheehy!’ says I, speaking to myself, ‘my man, you’re in a pretty hobble; and to leave poor Modderaroo after you!’ But the words were not well out of my mouth, when I heard the dismallest ullagoane in the world, enough to break any one’s heart that was not broke before, with the grief entirely; and it was not long till I could plainly see four men coming towards me, with a great black coffin on their shoulders. ‘I’d better get up in a tree,’ says I, ‘for they say ’tis not lucky to meet a corpse: I’m in the way of misfortune to-night, if ever man was.’
“I could not help wondering how a berrin (funeral) should come there in the lone wood at that time of night, seeing it could not be far from the dead hour. But it was little good for me thinking, for they soon came under the very tree I was roosting in, and down they put the coffin, and began to make a fine fire under me. I’ll be smothered alive now, thinks I, and that will be the end of me; but I was afraid to stir for the life, or to speak out to bid them just make their fire under some other tree, if it would be all the same thing to them. Presently they opened the coffin, and out they dragged as fine-looking a man as you’d meet with in a day’s walk.