Taig: Not at all!  And I being of his own family and his blood.

Darby: Of his blood now?

Taig: A relation I have, that is full up of money and of every whole thing.

Darby: A relation?

Taig: A first cousin, by the side of the mother.

Darby: Well, I am not without having a first cousin of my own.

Taig: I wouldn’t think he’d be much.  To be listening to my mother giving out a report of my one’s ways, you would maybe believe it is no empty skin of a man he is.

Darby: My own mother was not without giving out a report of my man’s ways.

Taig: Did she see him?

Darby: She did, I suppose, or the thing was near him.  She never was tired talking of him.

Taig: It is often my own mother would have Dermot pictured to myself.

Darby: It is often the likeness of Timothy was laid down to me by the teaching of my mother’s mouth, since I was able to walk the floor.  She thought the whole world of him.

Taig: A bright scholar she laid Dermot down to be.  A good doing fellow for himself.  A man would be well able to go up to his promise.

Darby: That is the same account used to be given out of Timothy.

Taig: To some trade of merchandise it is likely Dermot was reared.  A good living man that was never any cost on his mother.

Darby: To own an estate before he would go far in age Timothy was on the road.

Taig: To have the handling of silks and jewelleries and to be free of them, and of suits and the making of suits, that is the way with the big merchants of the world.

Darby: It is letting out his land to grass farmers a man owning acres does be making his profit.

Taig: A queer thing you to be the way you are, and he to be an upstanding gentleman.

Darby: It is the way I went down; my mother used to be faulting me and I not being the equal of him.  Tormenting and picking at me and shouting me on the road.  “You thraneen,” she’d say, “you little trifle of a son!  You stumbling over the threshold as if in slumber, and Timothy being as swift as a bee!”

Taig: So my own mother used to be going on at myself, and be letting out shrieks and screeches.  “What now would your cousin Dermot be saying?” every time there would come a new rent in my rags.

Darby: “Little he’d think of you,” she’d say; “you without body and puny, not fit to lift scraws from off the field, and Timothy bringing in profit to his mother’s hand, and earning prizes and rewards.”

Taig: The time it would fail me to follow my book or to say off my A, B, ab, to draw Dermot down on me she would.  “Before he was up to your age,” she would lay down, “he was fitted to say off Catechisms and to read newses.  You have no more intellect beside him,” she’d say, “than a chicken has its head yet in the shell.”