"The Master, sir——"
"Well, what does he want?"
"The loanst of a breeches, plase your honour."
"Why, you don't mean to tell me —— By Heaven, this is too good!" shouted Tom, bursting into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. "Why, Barney, you don't mean to say the ghost has got them again?"
Mr. Maguire did not respond to the young squire's risibility; the cast of his countenance was decidedly serious.
"Faith, then, it's gone they are, sure enough. Hasn't meself been looking over the bed, and under the bed, and in the bed, for the matter of that, and divel a ha'p'orth of breeches is there to the fore at all: I'm bothered entirely!"
"Harkye! Mr. Barney," said Tom, incautiously removing his thumb, and letting a crimson stream "incarnadine the multitudinous" lather that plastered his throat,—"this may be all very well with your master, but you don't humbug me, sir: tell me instantly what have you done with the clothes?"
This abrupt transition from "lively to severe" certainly took Maguire by surprise, and he seemed for an instant as much disconcerted as it is possible to disconcert an Irish gentleman's gentleman.
"Me? is it meself, then, that's the ghost to your honour's thinking?" said he, after a moment's pause, and with a slight shade of indignation in his tones; "is it I would stale the master's things,—and what would I do with them?"
"That you best know: what your purpose is I can't guess, for I don't think you mean to 'stale' them, as you call it; but that you are concerned in their disappearance, I am satisfied. Confound this blood!—give me a towel, Barney."