“Dinny, abouchal, will you come up till Phadrick Murray hears you arguin’ Scripthur wid myself, Dinny.  Now, Phadrick, listen, but keep your tongue sayin’ nothin’; just lave us to ourselves.  Come up, Dinny, till you have a hate at arguin’ wid myself.”

“Fadher, I condimnate you at once—­I condimnate you as being a most ungrammatical ould man, an’ not fit to argue wid any one that knows Murray’s English Grammar, an’ more espaciously the three concords of Lily’s Latin one; that is the cognation between the nominative case and the verb, the consanguinity between the substantive and the adjective, and the blood-relationship that irritates between the relative and the antecedent.”

“I tould you, Phadrick!!  There’s the boy that can rattle off the high English, and the larned Latin, jist as if he was born wid an English Dictionary in one cheek, a Latin Neksuggawn in the other, an Doctor Gallagher’s Irish Sarmons nately on the top of his tongue between the two.”

“Fadher, but that unfortunately I am afflicted wid modesty, I’d blush crocus for your ignorance, as Virgil asserts in his Bucolics, ut Virgilius ait in Bucolids; and as Horatius, a book that I’m well acquainted wid, says in another place, Huc pertinent verba, says he, commodandi, comparandi, dandi, prornittendi, soluendi imperandi nuntiandi, fidendi, obsequendi, minandi irascendi, et iis contraria.”

“That’s a good boy, Dinny; but why would you blush for my ignorance, avourneen?  Take care of yourself now an’ spake deep, for I’ll outargue you at the heel o’ the hunt, cute as you are.”

“Why do I blush for your ignorance, is it?  Why thin, I’m sure I have sound rasons for it; only think of the gross persivarance wid which you call that larned work, the Lexicon in Greek, a neck-suggan.  Fadher, never, attimpt to argue or display your ignorance wid me again.  But, moreover, I can probate you to be an ungrammatical man from your own modus of argument.”

“Go an, avourneen.  Phadrick!!”

“I’m listenin’.  The sorra’s no match for his cuteness, an’ one’s puzzled to think where he can get it all.”

“Why, you don’t know at all what I could do by larnin’.  It would be no throuble to me to divide myself into two halves, an’ argue the one agin the other.”

“You would, in throth, Dinny.”

“Ay, father, or cut myself acrass, an’ dispute my head, maybe, agin my heels.”

“Throth, would you!”

“Or practise logic wid my right hand, and bate that agin wid my left.”

“The sarra lie in it.”

“Or read the Greek Tistament wid my right eye, an thranslate it at the same time wid my left, according to the Greek an’ English sides of my face, wid my tongue constrein’ into Irish, unknownst to both o’ them.”

“Why, Denis, he must have a head like a bell to be able to get into things.”

“Throth an’ he has that, an’ ’ill make a noise in conthroversy yet, if he lives.  Now, Dinny, let us have a hate at histhory.”