‘Oh, I understand all those ways better—­no offence—­than you,’ says he, laughing, and at the same time filling his glass to my master’s good health, which convinced me he was a warm friend in his heart after all, though appearances were a little suspicious or so at first.  ’To be sure,’ says he, still cutting his joke, ’when a man’s over head and shoulders in debt, he may live the faster for it, and the better if he goes the right way about it; or else how is it so many live on so well, as we see every day, after they are ruined?’

‘How is it,’ says I, being a little merry at the time—­’how is it but just as you see the ducks in the chicken-yard, just after their heads are cut off by the cook, running round and round faster than when alive?’

At which conceit he fell a-laughing, and remarked he had never had the happiness yet to see the chicken-yard at Castle Rackrent.

‘It won’t be long so, I hope,’ says I; ’you’ll be kindly welcome there, as everybody is made by my master:  there is not a freer-spoken gentleman, or a better beloved, high or low, in all Ireland.’

And of what passed after this I’m not sensible, for we drank Sir Candy’s good health and the downfall of his enemies till we could stand no longer ourselves.  And little did I think at the time, or till long after, how I was harbouring my poor master’s greatest of enemies myself.  This fellow had the impudence, after coming to see the chicken-yard, to get me to introduce him to my son Jason; little more than the man that never was born did I guess at his meaning by this visit:  he gets him a correct list fairly drawn out from my son Jason of all my master’s debts, and goes straight round to the creditors and buys them all up, which he did easy enough, seeing the half of them never expected to see their money out of Sir Condy’s hands.  Then, when this base-minded limb of the law, as I afterwards detected him in being, grew to be sole creditor over all, he takes him out a custodiam on all the denominations and sub-denominations, and even carton and half-carton upon the estate [See glossary 27]; and not content with that, must have an execution against the master’s goods and down to the furniture, though little worth, of Castle Rackrent itself.  But this is a part of my story I’m not come to yet, and it’s bad to be forestalling:  ill news flies fast enough all the world over.

To go back to the day of the election, which I never think of but with pleasure and tears of gratitude for those good times:  after the election was quite and clean over, there comes shoals of people from all parts, claiming to have obliged my master with their votes, and putting him in mind of promises which he could never remember himself to have made:  one was to have a freehold for each of his four sons; another was to have a renewal of a lease; another an abatement; one came to be paid ten guineas for a pair of silver buckles sold my master on the hustings,