Taig: Ah, what’s manners but to refuse no man a share of your bite and to keep back your hand from throwing stones?

Darby: I tell you I’m in shivers!  My heart that is shaking like an ivy leaf!  My bones that are loosened and slackened in the similitude of a rope of tow!  I’d sooner meet with a lion of the wilderness or the wickedest wind of the hills!  I thought it never would come to pass.  I’d sooner go into the pettiest house, the wildest home and the worst!  Look at here now.  Let me stop along with yourself.  I never let out so much of my heart to any one at all till this day.  It’s a pity we should be parted!

Taig: Is it to come following after me you would, before the face of Dermot?

Darby: I’d feel no dread and you being at my side.

Taig: Dermot to see me in company with the like of you!  I wouldn’t for the whole world he should be aware I had ever any traffic with chimneys or with soot.  It would not be for his honour you to draw anear him!

Darby:  (Indignantly.) No but Timothy that would make objection to yourself!  He that would whip the world for manners and behaviour!

Taig: Dermot that is better again.  He that would write and dictate to you at the one time!

Darby: What is that beside owning tillage, and to need no education, but to take rents into your hand?

Taig: I would never believe him to own an estate.

Darby: Why wouldn’t he own it?  “The biggest thing and the grandest,” my mother would say when I would ask her what was he doing.

Taig: Ah, what could be before selling out silks and satins.  There is many an estated lord couldn’t reach you out a fourpenny bit.

Darby: The grandest house around the seas of Ireland he should have, beautifully made up!  You would nearly go astray in it!  It wouldn’t be known what you could make of it at all!  You wouldn’t have it walked in a month!

Taig: What is that beside having a range of shops as wide maybe as the street beyond?

Darby: A house would be the capital of the county!  One door for the rich, one door for the common!  Velvet carpets rolled up, the way there would no dust from the chimney fall upon them.  A hundred wouldn’t be many standing in a corner of that place!  A high bed of feathers, curled hair mattresses.  A cover laid on it would be flowery with blossoms of gold!

Taig: Muslin and gauze, cambric and linen!  Canton crossbar!  Glass windows full up of ribbons as gaudy as the crooked bow in the sky!  Sovereigns and shillings in and out as plenty as to riddle rape seed.  Sure them that do be selling in shops die leaving millions.

Darby: Your man is not so good as mine in his office or in his billet.

Taig: There is the horn of the coach.  Get out now till I’ll prepare myself.  He might chance to come seeking for me here.