Mr. Yorke denied the charge with emphasis:
“It is no such thing, you—you vertebrate!”
Patrick drew himself up with an air of dignified resolution. “Sir,” he said, “I’ve done my duty by you, and you’ve done your duty by me, and I’ve taken many a sharp word from you, and made no complaint. But I’m an honest man, if I am not rich nor learned, and I won’t stand and let any one call me such a name as that.”
Mr. Yorke laughed out irrepressibly. “Well, well, Pat,” he said, “I beg your pardon. You’re not a vertebrate.”
“All right, sir!” Pat answered cheerfully, and went about his work satisfied.
Mr. Yorke, his good humor quite restored, went into the house again.
“Poor Pat!” Edith said, a little zealously, when the others smiled over the story.
“We are not scorning him for his ignorance, my dear,” her uncle replied. “With Charles Lamb, ‘I honor an honest obliquity of understanding,’ and I also honor an honest ignorance of books; but sometimes they are amusing.”
“What did I hear you saying to Mr. Yorke, Pat?” Betsey asked the man that evening. “It seemed to me that you were impudent.”
“The fact is, I was really mad,” Patrick owned. “I’d been downtown, and there I came across the editor of the Herald, and the sight of him roiled me, especially as he grinned and made believe bless himself. I’d like to meet him alone in a quiet bit of woods. I’d soon change his complexion to as beautiful a black and blue as you ever saw—the dirty spalpeen, with his eye like a buttonhole!”