would be nothing more about it, except to brake another skull or two for it; but neither crowner’s quest, nor judge, nor jury, was ever troubled at all about it.  And so sign’s on it, people were then innocent, and not up to law and counsellors as they are now.  If a person happened to be killed in a fight at a fair or market, why he had only to appear after his death to one of his friends, and get a number of masses offered up for his sowl, and all was right; but now the times are clane altered, and there’s nothing but hanging and transporting for such things; although that won’t bring the people to life again.”

“I suppose,” said Andy Morrow, “you had a famous dinner, Shane?”

“’Tis you that may say that, Mr. Morrow,” replied Shane:  “but the house, you see, wasn’t able to hould one-half of us; so there was a dozen or two tables borrowed from the neighbors and laid one after another in two rows, on the green, beside the river that ran along the garden-hedge, side by side.  At one end Father Corrigan sat, with Mary and myself, and Father James at the other.  There were three five-gallon kegs of whiskey, and I ordered my brother to take charge of them; and there he sat beside them, and filled the bottles as they were wanted—­bekase, if he had left that job to strangers, many a spalpeen there would make away with lots of it.  Mavrone, such a sight as the dinner was!  I didn’t lay my eye on the fellow of it since, sure enough, and I’m now an ould man, though I was then a young one.  Why there was a pudding boiled in the end of a sack; and troth it was a thumper, only for the straws—­for you see, when they were making it, they had to draw long straws acrass in order to keep, it from falling asunder—­a fine plan it is, too.  Jack M’Kenna, the carpenther, carved it with a hand-saw, and if he didn’t curse the same straws, I’m not here.  ‘Draw them out, Jack,’ said Father Corrigan—­’draw them out.—­It’s asy known, Jack, you never ate a polite dinner, you poor awkward spalpeen, or you’d have pulled out the straws the first thing you did, man alive.’

“Such lashins of corned beef, and rounds of beef, and legs of mutton, and bacon—­turkeys and geese, and barn-door fowls, young and fat.  They may talk as they will, but commend me to a piece of good ould bacon, ate with crock butther, and phaties, and cabbage.  Sure enough, they leathered away at everything, but this and the pudding were the favorites.  Father Corrigan gave up the carving in less than no time, for it would take him half a day to sarve them all, and he wanted to provide for number one.  After helping himself, he set my uncle to it, and maybe he didn’t slash away right and left.  There was half a dozen gorsoons carrying about the beer in cans, with froth upon it like barm—­but that was beer in airnest, Nancy—­I’ll say no more.”