“Oh, fie! and the whiskey here at your elbow!”
The piper lifted his leg, and away wint the garron again. After much more talk, and two or three stoppages, Carolan at last says to the gentleman, “Now I'd like to know, sir,—may be you won't tell me, though;—but why shouldn't you?—”
“Ask me no impertinent questions, and behave yourself in every respect, or you'll wish you hadn't a tongue in your head this journey, when you come to know me,—as perhaps you may.”
“Perhaps I won't, though;—for I've no great opinion of you. Perhaps, I won't know you to plaize you. But you'll own I'm right in not riding another step with one that won't tell me which way he'd be going.”
“Don't stop the horse again, and you shall know at least where I'm bound to:—indeed, I tould you long ago, it was to The Beg.”
“Is it The Beg?—and so you did, now I remember. May be you're a new butler?—No?—A bailiff, then?—Yet why should you? There's nobody there now that's in debt. And if you ar'n't either the one or the other, what can you be?—But it's bad manners in me to be bothering my brains with guessing who you are, when I don't care about knowing. You won't go to The Beg though, anyhow, to-night it's a long three miles from where we stop a bad road and up-hill entirely, too.”
“Can I get a bed, think you?”
“Why, then, Luke Fogarty's is the state cabin o' the whole place, and he'd give up his own bed any day to a stranger, though he hasn't the best of characters; and Ramilies, his pig—”
“His what?”
“Ramilies, his pig;—they say she's a witch: she farrows nineteen, four or five times a year; and she has tushes like ram's horns, only they're straight. She goes miles away by the sea-side and walks into the water, like a Christian, to nuzzle up crabs among the rocks. It's often I've seen her scrunching them: they nips her—trust them for that—with their claws; but I'm inclined to believe, the pinches she gets on her tongue serves by way of a fillip or sauce to the feast, by the same ride that donkeys like thistles that's prickly, and we ourselves mustard with pork. If I'd a house to pull down to-morrow, I wouldn't wish a better workman than Ramilies, if she hadn't her dinner, and there was fish inside, and the doors barred. They say, she drinks whiskey when she can get it:—but what need have you to be afraid? Won't I be there with you?—Sure I will.—Ramilies has no ear for music, and one blow of my bagpipes drives her. As to Luke,—why, if Luke shouldn't behave himself, it won't be the first time I've poked my wooden leg in the face of him, and broke his ugly deaf head, with the big hollow bull's-hom he has for an ear-pipe, into the bargain. Corney Carolan is well able for him, or any one else, if he's only awake.”