6
I think I have put a triek upon them fellows, for selling the letter to you. What have you done? I have only taken other two letters: here's one for you master, to help your dear penny-worth, and I'll send the other to my mother to see whether she be dead or alive, for she's always angry I don't write to her. I had not the word well spoken, till he got up his stick and beat me heartily for it, and sent me baek to the fellows again with the two. I had very ill will to go, but nobody would buy them of me.
Tom. Well, Paddy, I think you was to blame and your master too, for he ought to have taught you how to go about these affairs, and not beat you so.
Teag. Arra dear honey, I had too much wit of my own to be teached by him, or any body else: he began to instruet me after that, how I should serve the table, and such nasty things as those:one night I took ben a roasted fish in one hand, and a piece of bread in the other; the old gentleman was so sauey he would not take it, and told me I should bring nothing to him without a trencher below it. The same night as he was going to bed, he ealled for his slippers and pish-pot, so I clapt a treneher below the pish-pot, and another below the slippers, and ben I goes, one in every hand; no sooner did I enter the room, than he threw the pish-pot at me which broke both my head and the pish-pot at one blow; now, said I, the devil is in my master altogether, for what he commands at one time he eountermands at another. Next day I went with him to the market to buy a sack of potatoes, I went unto the potatoe-monger, and asked what he took for the full of a Scot's eog, he weighed them in, he asked no less than fourpenee; fourpenee, said I, if I were but in Dublin, I could get the double of that for nothing, and in Cork and Linsale far cheaper; them is but small things like pense, said I, but the potatoes in my country is as big as your head, fine meat, all made up in blessed mouthful; the potatoes
