“I had, sir: they are in the hands of Mr. O'Brien. I also had a character from my father's landlord.”
“But how,” asked the other, “have you existed here during your illness? Have you been long sick?”
“Indeed I can't tell you, sir, for I don't know how the time passed at all; but I know, sir, that there were always two or three people attendin' me. They sent me whatever they thought I wanted, upon a shovel or a pitchfork, across the ditch, because they were afraid to come near me.”
During the early part of the dialogue, two or three old hats, or caubeens, might have been seen moving steadily over from the wigwam to the ditch which ran beside the shed occupied by M'Evoy. Here they remained stationary, for those who wore them were now within hearing of the conversation, and ready to give their convalescent patient a good word, should it be necessary.
“How were you supplied with drink and medicine?” asked the younger stranger.
“As I've just told you, sir,” replied Jemmy; “the neighbors here let me want for nothing that they had. They kept me in more whey than I could use; and they got me medicine, too, some way or other. But indeed, sir, during a great part of the time I was ill, I can't say how they attended me: I wasn't insinsible, sir, of what was goin' on about me.”
One of those who lay behind the ditch now arose, and after a few hems and scratchings of the head, ventured to join in the conversation.
“Pray have you, my man,” said the elder of the two, “been acquainted with the circumstances of this boy's illness?”
“Is it the poor scholar, my Lord?* Oh thin bedad it's myself that has that. The poor crathur was in a terrible way all out, so he was. He caught the faver in the school beyant, one day, an' was turned out by the nager o' the world that he was larnin' from.”
* The peasantry always address a Roman Catholic Bishop
as “My Lord.”