The watchman named Garvy took the heavy keys, and big with the deputed authority, swept, like the destroying angel upon a small scale, through the tumultuous crew that were assembled in this villanous pandemonium, thrashing the unfortunate vagabonds on the naked head, or otherwise, as the case might be, without regard to age, sex, or condition, leaving bumps, welts, cuts, oaths, curses, and execrations, ad infinitum, behind him.  Owing to this distribution of official justice a partial calm was restored, and the charge of Mrs. Mulroony was opened in form.

“Well, Mrs. Mulroony, what charge is this you have against Misther Gray?”

“Because,” replied Ambrose, “I wasn’t in possession of assets to pay her own.  Had I met her most iniquitous charge at home, honest Ned, I should have escaped the minor one here.  You know of old, Ned, how she lost her conscience one night, about ten years ago; and the poor woman, although she put it in the ‘Hue and Cry,’ by way of novelty, never got it since.  None of the officers of justice knew of such a commodity; ergo, Ned, I suffer.”

Here Mr. Ambrose winked at Ned, and touched his breeches pocket significantly, as much as to say, “the bribe is where you know.”

Ned, however, was strictly impartial, and declined, with most commendable virtue, to recognize the signal, until he saw whether Mrs. Mulroony did not understand “generosity” as well as Mr. Gray.

“Misther Gray, I’ll thank you to button your lip, if you plaise.  It’s all very right, I suppose; but in the manetime let daicent Mrs. Mulroony tell her own story.  How is it, ma’am?”

“Faith, plain enough,” she replied; “he came in about half past five o’clock, with three or four skips from college—­”

“Scamps, Mrs. Mulroony.  Be just, be correct, ma’am.  We were all gentlemen scamps, Ned, from college.  Everybody knows that a college scamp is a respectable character, especially if he be a divinity student, a class whom we are proud to place at our head.  You are now corrected, Mrs. Mulroony—­proceed.”

“Well; he tould me to get a dinner for five; but first asked to see what he called ‘the bill of hair.’”

“In your hands it is anything but a bill of rights, Mrs. Mulroony.”

“I tould him not to trouble himself; that my dinner was as good as another’s, which I thought might satisfy him; but instead o’ that, he had the assurance to ask me if I could give them hair soup.  I knew very well what the skip was at.”

“Scamp, ma’am, and you will oblige me.”

“For if grief for poor Andy (weeping), that suffered mainly for what he was as innocent of as the unborn child—­if grief, an’ every one knows it makes the hair to fall; an’ afther all it’s only a bit of a front I’m wearin’;—­ah, you villain, it was an ill-hearted cut, that.”

“It wasn’t a cut did it, Mrs. Mulroony; it fell off naturally, and by instalments—­or rather it was a cut, and that was what made you feel it; that youthful old gentleman, Time, gave it a touch with a certain scythe he carries.  No such croppy as old Time, Mrs. Mulroony.”  On concluding, he winked again at old Ned, and touched his pocket as before.