"Well then, sir," commenced he, "you may remimber that it was on a Friday you took lave of me—last Friday of all—Friday was never a looky day by say or by land: ye see, I didn't go far afore I met with a disappointment, for I met a berrin' comin' right fornenst me—what coud I do but turn back, in dacency, with it?—and, after I'd keen'd about a mile with the mourners, I made bould to ax who was the body that was makin' a blackberry ov himself."
"A blackberry!" interrupted I.
"Yes, yir honor, a blackberry," replied Darby: "do ye know that, let it shoot never so far, it's sure to come back as near as it can to the root of it where it first started; and so arn't we all blackberries? As the priest says on Ash-Wendsday, "Remember, man, you are but dust, and into dust you must return." Now, I've known bigger dusts in their lifetime than they were turned out of afterward, when they took to studyin' astronamy with
'The tops of their toes,
And the tip of their nose,
Turn'd up to the roots of the daisies!'
But, whose berrin' should it be, after all, but ould Jemmy Cullen, the piper's! Ye know Jemmy Cullen, yir honour? him that used to play the organ on the pipes at high-mass durin' Christmas an' Easter. Oh! he was the boy to lilt at a weddin' or a wake! but, pace be width 'im—God rest his sowl! as I said when I saw the scragh put over him for the first time. Well, ye know, yir honor, that oncet upon the same road width them I coudn't do more nor less than wet our clay together; so, after walkin' the corpse three times round the churchyard of Glassin-oge—Were ye ever berried there, sir?—I mane, wud ye like to be berried there, sir?"
"Not just yet," said I.
"Oh, the Lord forbid, sir!" cried Darby. "I didn't mane that, by no manes. God send ye many days, and prosprous ones too! But there's a taste in chusin' a berrin'-ground as well as there is in a drawin'-room," said he, looking around him.
"So there may be," said I; "but that is only the whim or notion of a living man. When he dies, all churchyards are the same to him; he then can have no considerations about the matter."