look lower than his nose and wag his tongue a bit.  She’s one to be a mother of stout ones that won’t run up big doctors’ bills or ask assistance in growing.  Her name’s plain Jane, and she ’s a girl to breed conquerors; and the same you may say of her brother John, who ’s a mighty fit man, good at most things, though he counts his fortune in millions, which I’ve heard is lighter for a beggar to perform than in pounds, but he can count seven, and beat any of us easy by showing them millions!  We might do something for them at home with a million or two, Phil.  It all came from the wedding of a railway contractor, who sprang from the wedding of a spade and a clod—­and probably called himself Mattock at his birth, no shame to him.’

‘You’re for the city,’ said Philip, after they had walked down the street.

‘Not I,’ said Con.  ’Let them play Vesuvius down there.  I’ve got another in me:  and I can’t stop their eruption, and they wouldn’t relish mine.  I know a little of Dick Martin, who called on the people to resist, and housed the man Liffey after his firing the shot, and I’m off to Peter M’Christy, his brother-in-law.  I’ll see Distell too.  I must know if it signifies the trigger, or I’m agitated about nothing.  Dr. Forbery’ll be able to tell how far they mean going for a patriotic song.

              “For we march in ranks to the laurelled banks,
               On the bright horizon shining,
               Though the fields between run red on the green,
               And many a wife goes pining.”

Will you come, Phil?’

’I ‘m under orders.’

‘You won’t engage yourself by coming.’

‘I’m in for the pull if I join hands.’

‘And why not?—­inside the law, of course.’

‘While your Barney skirmishes outside!’

’And when the poor fellow’s cranium’s cracking to fling his cap in the air, and physician and politician are agreed it’s good for him to do it, or he’ll go mad and be a dangerous lunatic!  Phil, it must be a blow now and then for these people over here, else there’s no teaching their imaginations you’re in earnest; for they’ve got heads that open only to hard raps, these English; and where injustice rules, and you’d spread a light of justice, a certain lot of us must give up the ghost—­naturally on both sides.  Law’s law, and life’s life, so long as you admit that the law is bad; and in that case, it’s big misery and chronic disease to let it be and at worst a jump and tumble into the next world, of a score or two of us if we have a wrestle with him.  But shake the old villain; hang on him and shake him.  Bother his wig, if he calls himself Law.  That ’s how we dust the corruption out of him for a bite or two in return.  Such is humanity, Phil:  and you must allow for the roundabout way of moving to get into the straight road at last.  And I see what you’re for saying:  a roundabout eye won’t find it!  You’re wrong where there are dozens of corners.  Logic like yours, my boy, would have you go on picking at the Gordian Knot till it became a jackasses’ race between you and the rope which was to fall to pieces last.—­There ’s my old girl at the stall, poor soul!  See her!’