“You’re a very refined gentleman, upon my word! Were you ever in England?”
“I was, part of three years.”
“Oh, that accounts for it, I suppose!” said Mr. Mooney, accepting this lucid statement without a stagger, and passing lightly on. “You’re a widower, I understand, with no objection to consoling yourself?”
No answer.
“Now, sir! Can you deny that you made proposals of marriage to Con Brickley’s daughter last Shraft?”
The plot thickened. Con Brickley’s daughter was my kitchen maid.
Jer Keohane smiled tolerantly. “Ah! that was a thing o’ nothing.”
“Nothing!” said Mr. Mooney, with a roar of a tornado. “Do you call an impudent proposal of marriage to a respectable man’s daughter nothing! That’s English manners, I suppose!”
“I was goin’ home one Sunday,” said Jer Keohane, conversationally, to the Bench, “and I met the gerr’l and her mother. I spoke to the gerr’l in a friendly way, and asked her why wasn’t she gettin’ marrid, and she commenced to peg stones at me and dhrew several blows of an umbrella on me. I had only three bottles of porther taken. There now was the whole of it.”
Mrs. Brickley, from the gallery, groaned heavily and ironically.