dispose of the various dishes upon the table according to high life and mathematics?  Wouldn’t you be too old to bathe my feet when I’d be unwell?  Wouldn’t you be too old to bring me my whey in the morning soon as I’d awake, perhaps with a severe headache, after the plenary indulgence of a clerical compotation?  Wouldn’t you be too old to sit up till the middle of the nocturnal hour, awaiting my arrival home?  Wouldn’t you be—­”

“Hut, tut, that’s enough, Denny, I’d never do at all.  No, no, but I’ll sit a clane, dacent ould woman in the corner upon a chair that you’ll get made for me.  There I’ll be wid my pipe and tobacco, smokin’ at my aise, chattin’ to the sarvints, and sometimes discoorsin’ the neighbors that’ll come to inquire for you, when they’ll be sittin’ in the kitchen waitin’ till you get through your office.  Jist let me have that, Dinny achora, and I’ll be as happy as the day’s long.”

“And I on the other side,” said his father, naturally enough struck with the happy simplicity of the picture which his wife drew, “on the other side, Mave, a snug, dacent ould man, chattin’ to you across the fire, proud to see the bishop an’ the gintlemen about him.  An’ I wouldn’t ax to be taken into the parlor at all, except, maybe, when there would be nobody there but yourself, Denis; an’ that your mother an’ I would go into the parlor to get a glass of punch, or, if it could be spared, a little taste of wine for novelty.”

“And so you shall, both of you—­you, father, at one side of the hob, and my mother here at the other, the king and queen of my culinarian dominions.  But practice taciturnity a little—­I’m visited by the muse, and must indulge in a strain of vocal melody—­hem—­’tis a few lines of my own composure, the offspring of a moment of inspiration by the nine female Heliconians; but before I incipiate, here’s to my own celebrity to-morrow, and afterwards all your healths!”

He then proceeded to sing in his best style a song composed, as he said, by himself, but which, as the composition was rather an eccentric one, we decline giving.

“Denis,” said his brother, “you’ll have great sport at the Station’s.”

“Yes, Brian, most inimitable specimen of fraternity, I do look into the futurity of a station with great complacency.  Hem—­in the morning I rise up in imagination, and after reading part of my office, I and my curate—­ego et coadjutor metis—­or, if I get a large parish, perhaps I and my two curates—­ego et coudjutores mei—­order our horses, and of a fine, calm summer morning we mount them as gracefully as three throopers.  The sun is up, and of coorse the moon is down, and the glitter of the light, the sparkling of the dew, the canticles of the birds, and the melodiotis cowing of the crows in Squire Grimshaw’s rookery—­”

“Why, Denis, is it this parish you’ll have?”