Mineog: There are yet other diseases besides that.

Hazel: You put the measles over you and we going the road to school.

Mineog: There is more than measles has power bring a man down.

Hazel: You had the chin-cough passed and you rising.  We were cut at the one time for the pock.

Mineog: A disease to be allotted to you it would find you out, and you maybe up twenty mile in the air!

Hazel: Ah, what disease could have you swept in the course of the next two days?

Mineog: That is what I’m after saying—­unless you might have murder in your mind?

Hazel: Ah, what murder!

Mineog: What way are you thinking to do away with me?  To shoot me with the trigger of a gun and to give me shortening of life?

Hazel: The trigger of a gun!  God bless it, I never fingered such a thing in the length of my life!

Mineog: To take aim at me and destroy me; to shoot me in forty halves like a crow in the time of the wheat!

Hazel: Oh, now, don’t say a thing like that!

Mineog: Or to drown me maybe in the river, enticing me across the rotten plank of the bridge. (Seizing bottle.) Will you tell me on the virtue of your oath, is death lurking in that sherry wine?

Hazel:  (Pulling out paper.) Ah, God bless your jig!  And how would I know is it a notice of my own death has come into my hand in the pocket of this coat I put on me through a mistake?

Mineog: Give it here.  That’s my property!

Hazel:  (Reading.) “We sympathise with Mrs. Hazel and the family.”  There is proof now.  Is it that you would go grieving with my wife and I to be living yet?

Mineog: I didn’t follow you out beyond this world with craving for the repose of your soul.  It is nothing at all beside what you wrote.

Hazel: Oh, I bear no grudge at all against you.  I am not huffy and crabbed like yourself to go taking offence.  Sure Kings and big people of the sort are used to see their dead-notices made ready from the hour of their birth out.  And it is not anything printed on papers or any flight of words on the Tribune could give me any concern at all.  See now will I be put out. (Reads.) What now is this?  “Mr. Hazel was of good race, having in him the old stock of the country, the Mahons, the O’Hagans, the Casserlys——.”  Where now did you get that?  I never heard before, a Casserly to be in my fathers.

Mineog: It might be on the side of the mother.

Hazel: It was not.  My mother was a girl of the Hessians that was born in the year of the French.  My grandmother was Winefred Kane.

Mineog: What is being out in one name towards drawing down the forecast of all classes of deaths upon myself?

Hazel: There are twenty thousand things you might lay down and I would give them no leave to annoy me.  But I have no mind any strange family to be mixed through me, but to go my own road and to carry my own character.