"Gentleman usher?"
"No, not usher," responded Tom indignantly: "I have nothing to do with ushers; they are scabby dogs of poor scholards, sizards, half-pays, and the like; and all the young gentlemen much prefer me:—but I am his fiddleus Achates, as master Jack Toler calls me,—that's a purty pup who will make some fun some of these days,—his whacktotum, head-cook, and dairy-maid, slush, and butler. What are you here?"
"Why," replied the man at the gate, "I am a butler as well as you."
"Oh! then we're both butlers; and you could as well pass us in. By coarse, the butler must be a great fellow here; and I see you are rigged out in the cast clothes of my lord. Isn't that true?"
"True enough: he never gets a suit of clothes that it does not fall to my lot to wear it; but if you wish to see the castle, I think I can venture to show you all that it contains, even for the sake of our being two butlers."
It was not much sooner said than done. Tom accompanied his companion over the house and grounds, making sundry critical observations on all he saw therein,—on painting, architecture, gardening, the sublime and beautiful, the scientific and picturesque,—in a manner which I doubt not much resembled the average style of reviewing those matters in what we now call the best public instructors.
"Rum-looking old ruffians!" observed Tom, on casting his eyes along the gallery containing the portraitures of the Ormondes. "Look at that fellow there all battered up in iron; I wish to God I had as good a church as he would rob!"
"He was one of the old earls," replied his guide, "in the days of Henry the Eighth; and I believe he did help in robbing churches."
"I knew it by his look," said Tom; "and there's a chap there in a wilderness of a wig. Gad! he looks as if he was like to be hanged."
"He was so," said the cicerone; "for a gentleman of the name of Blood was about to pay him that compliment at Tyburn."