Hazel: I tell you I had it put by this long time till I would have occasion to use it.

Mineog: Is it this long time, so, you have been waiting for my death?

Hazel: Not at all.

Mineog: You to kill me to-day and to think to bury me to-morrow!

Hazel: Can’t you listen?  I was wanting something to fill space.

Mineog: Would nothing serve you to fill space but only my own corpse?  To go set my coffin making and to put nettles growing on my hearth!  Wouldn’t it be enough to rob my house or to make an attack upon my means?  Wouldn’t that fill up the gap?

Hazel: Let you not twist it that way!

Mineog: The time I was in the face of my little dinner to go startle me with a thing of the sort!  I’m not worth the ground I stand on!  For the Champion of next Thursday!  I to be dead ere Thursday!

Hazel: I looked for no such thing.

Mineog: What is it makes you say me to be done and dying?  Am I reduced in the face?

Hazel: You are not.

Mineog: Am I yellow and pale and shrunken?

Hazel: Why would you be?

Mineog: Would you say me to be crampy in the body?  Am I staggery in the legs?

Hazel: I see no such signs.

Mineog: Is it in my hand you see them?  Is it lame or is it freezed-brittle like ice?

Hazel: It is as warm and as good as my own.

Mineog: Let me take a hold of you till you will tell me has it the feel of a dead man’s grip.

Hazel: I know that it has not.

Mineog: Is it shaking like a bunch of timber shavings?

Hazel: Not at all, not at all.

Mineog: It should be my hearing that is failing from me, or that I am crippled and have lost my walk.

Hazel: You are roaring and bawling without sense.

Mineog: Let the Champion go to flitters before I will die to please it!  I will not give in to it driving me out of the world before my hour is spent!  It would hardly ask that of a man would be of no use and no account, or even of a beast of any consequence.

Hazel: Who is asking you to die?

Mineog: Giving no time hardly for the priest to overtake me and to give me the rites of the Church!

Hazel: I tell you there is no danger of you giving up at all!  Every person knows there must some sickness come before death.  Some take it from a neighbour and it is put on others by God.

Mineog: Even so, it’s hard say.

Hazel: You have not a ha’p’orth on you.  No complaint in the world wide.

Mineog: That’s nothing!  Sickness comes upon some as sudden as to clap their hands.

Hazel: What are you talking about?  You are thinking us to be in the days of the cholera yet!