“You’re the very man I wanted to see,” I said, as I sat down beside him at the oilcloth covered table; “a man I know in England who is not much of a judge of character has asked me to buy him a four-year-old down here, and as I should rather be stuck by a friend than a dealer, I wish you’d take over the job.”
Flurry poured himself out another cup of tea, and dropped three lumps of sugar into it in silence.
Finally he said, “There isn’t a four-year-old in this country that I’d be seen dead with at a pig fair.”
This was discouraging, from the premier authority on horseflesh in the district.
“But it isn’t six weeks since you told me you had the finest filly in your stables that was ever foaled in the County Cork,” I protested; “what’s wrong with her?”
“Oh, is it that filly?” said Mr. Knox, with a lenient smile; “she’s gone these three weeks from me. I swapped her and £6 for a three-year-old Ironmonger colt, and after that I swapped the colt and £19 for that Bandon horse I rode last week at your place, and after that again I sold the Bandon horse for £75 to old Welply, and I had to give him back a couple of sovereigns luck-money. You see, I did pretty well with the filly after all.”
“Yes, yes—oh, rather,” I assented, as one dizzily accepts the propositions of a bimetallist; “and you don’t know of anything else——?”
The room in which we were seated was closed from the shop by a door with a muslin-curtained window in it; several of the panes were broken, and at this juncture two voices, that had for some time carried on a discussion, forced themselves upon our attention.
“Begging your pardon for contradicting you, ma’am,” said the voice of Mrs. McDonald, proprietress of the tea-shop, and a leading light in Skebawn Dissenting circles, shrilly tremulous with indignation, “if the servants I recommend you won’t stop with you, it’s no fault of mine. If respectable young girls are set picking grass out of your gravel, in place of their proper work, certainly they will give warning!”