“Well,” shouted Culhane finally, as a stop-gap to all this, “isn’t any one going to blow that thing?  Do you mean to tell me that I’m hauling all of you around, with not a man among you able to blow a dinky little horn?  What’s the use of my keeping a lot of fancy vehicles in my barn when all I have to deal with is a lot of shoe salesmen and floorwalkers?  Hell!  Any child can blow it.  It’s as easy as a fish-horn.  If I hadn’t these horses to attend to I’d blow it myself.  Come on—­come on!  Kerrigan, what’s the matter with you blowing it?”

“The truth is, Mr. Culhane,” explained Mr. Kerrigan, the very dapper and polite heir of a Philadelphia starch millionaire, “I haven’t had any chance to practice with one of those for several years.  I’ll try it if you want me to, but I can’t guarantee—­”

“Try!” insisted Culhane violently.  “You can’t do any worse than that other mutt, if you blow for a million years.  Blow it!  Blow it!”

Mr. Kerrigan turned back and being very cheerfully tendered the horn by the last failure, wetted and adjusted his lips, lifted it upward and backward—­and—­

It was pathetic.  It was positively dreadful, the wheezing, grinding sounds that were emitted.

“God!” shouted Culhane, pulling up the coach to a dead stop.  “Stop that!  Whoa!  Whoa!!!  Do you mean to say that that’s the best you can do?  Well, this finishes me!  Whoa!  What kind of a bunch of cattle have I got up here, anyhow?  Whoa!  And out in this country too where I’m known and where they know all about such things!  God!  Whoa!  Here I spend thousands of dollars to get together an equipment that will make a pleasant afternoon for a crowd of gentlemen, and this is what I draw—­hams!  A lot of barflies who never saw a tally-ho!  Well, I’m done!  I’m through!  I’ll split the damned thing up for firewood before I ever take it out again!  Get down!  Get out, all of you!  I’ll not haul one of you back a step!  Walk back or anywhere you please—­to hell, for all I care!  I’m through!  Get out!  I’m going to turn around and get back to the barn as quick as I can—­up some alley if I can find one.  To think of having such a bunch of hacks to deal with!”

Humbly and wearily we climbed down and, while he drove savagely on to some turning-place, stood about first in small groups, then by twos and threes began making our way—­rather gingerly, I must confess, in our fine clothes—­along the winding road back to the place on the hill.  But such swearing!  Such un-Sabbath-like comments!  The number of times his sturdy Irish soul was wished into innermost and almost sacrosanct portions of Sheol!  He was cursed from more angles and in more artistically and architecturally nobly constructed phrases and even paragraphs than any human being that I have ever heard of before or since, phrases so livid and glistening that they smoked.

Talk about the carved ivories of speech!  The mosaics of verbal precious stones!