“Och! thin, Dick, avourneen, it’s myself that’s jist tired thinking of that; at any rate, consamin’ to the loose foot he’ll get this blessed month to come, Dick, agra!”

“Throth, Nancy,” another mischievous monkey would exclaim, “if you hadn’t great patience entirely, you couldn’t put up with such threatment, at all at all.”

“Why thin, God knows it’s true for-you, Barney.  D’ye hear that, ‘graceless?’ the very childhre making a laughing-stock and a may-game of you!—­but wait till we get under the roof, any how.”

“Ned,” a third would say, “isn’t it a burning shame for you to break the poor crathur’s heart this a-way?  Throth, but you ought to hould down your head, sure enough—­a dacent woman! that only for her you wouldn’t have a house over you, so you wouldn’t.”

“And throth, and the same house is going, Tim,” Nancy would exclaim, “and when it goes, let him see thin who’ll do for him; let him thry if his blackguards will stand to him, when he won’t have poor foolish Nancy at his back.”

During these conversations, Ned would walk on between his two guards with a dogged-looking and condemned face; Nancy behind him, with his own cudgel, ready to administer an occasional bang whenever he attempted to slacken his pace, or throw over his shoulder a growl of dissent or justification.

On getting near home, the neighbors would occasionally pop out their heads, with a smile of good-humored satire on their faces, which Nancy was very capable of translating: 

“Ay,” she would say, addressing them, “I’ve caught him—­here he is to the fore.  Indeed you may well laugh, Kitty Rafferty; not a one of myself blames you for it.—­Ah, ye mane crathur,” aside to Ned, “if you had the blood of a hen in you, you wouldn’t have the neighbors braking their hearts laughing at you in sich a way; and above all the people in the world, them Rafferty’s, that got the decree against us at the last sessions, although I offered to pay within fifteen shillings of the differ—­the grubs!”

Having seen her hopeful charge safely deposited on the hob, Nancy would throw her cloak into this corner, and her bonnet into that, with the air of a woman absorbed by the consideration of some vexatious trial; she would then sit down, and, lighting her doodeen, (* a short pipe) exclaim—­

“Wurrah, wurrah! but it’s me that’s the heart-scalded crathur with that man’s four quarters!  The Lord may help me and grant me patience with him, any way!—­to have my little honest, hard-earned penny spint among a pack of vagabonds, that don’t care if him and me wor both down the river, so they could get their skinful of drink out of him!  No matther, agra, things can’t long be this a-way; but what does Ned care?—­give him drink and fighting, and his blackguards about him, and that’s his glory.  There now’s the landlord coming down upon us for the rint; and unless he takes the cows out of the byre, or the bed from anundher us, what in the wide earth is there for him?”