“When the breakfast was over, up gets Father Flannagan—­out with his book, and on with his stole, to marry them.  The bride and bridegroom went up to the end of the room, attended by their friends, and the rest of the company stood on each side of it, for you see they were too high bred, and knew their manners too well, to stand in a crowd like spalpeens.  For all that, there was many a sly look from the ladies to their bachelors, and many a titter among them, grand as they were; for, to tell the truth, the best of them likes to see fun in the way, particularly of that sort.  The priest himself was in as great a glee as any of them, only he kept it under, and well he might, for sure enough this marriage was nothing less than a rare windfall to him and the parson that was to marry them after him—­bekase you persave a Protestant and Catholic must be married by both, otherwise it does not hould good in law.  The parson was as grave as a mustard-pot, and Father Flannagan called the bride and bridegroom his childher, which was a big bounce for him to say the likes of, more betoken that neither of them was a drop’s blood to him.

“However, he pulled out the book, and was just beginning to buckle them when in comes Jack’s ould acquaintance, the smoking cur, as grave as ever.  The priest had just got through two or three words of Latin, when the dog gives him a pluck by the sleeve; Father Flannagan, of coorse, turned round to see who it was that nudged him:  ‘Behave yourself,’ says the dog to him, just as he peeped over his shoulder—–­’behave yourself,’ says he; and with that he sat him down on his hunkers beside the priest, and pulling a cigar instead of a pipe out of his pocket, he put it in his mouth, and began to smoke for the bare life of him.  And, by my own word, it’s he that could smoke:  at times he would shoot the smoke in a slender stream like a knitting-needle, with a round curl at the one end of it, ever so far out of the right side of his mouth; then he would shoot it out of the left, and sometimes make it swirl out so beautiful from the middle of his lips!—­why, then, it’s he that must have been the well-bred puppy all out, as far as smoking went.  Father Flannagan and they all were thundherstruck.

“‘In the name of St. Anthony, and of that holy nun, St. Teresa,’ said his Reverence to him, ‘who and what are you, at all at all?’

“‘Never mind that,’ says the dog, taking the cigar for a minute between his claws; ’but if you wish particularly to know, I’m a thirty-second cousin of your own by the mother’s side.’

“‘I command you in the name of all the saints,’ says Father Flarmagan, believing him to be the devil, ’to disappear from among us, and never become visible to any one in this house again.’

“‘The sorra a budge, at the present time, will I budge,’ says the dog to him, ‘until I see all sides rightified, and the rogues disappointed.’