“Will I carry the box for ye, Miss?” Croppy inquired compassionately, stuffing his lighted pipe into his pocket, as I drifted desolately past him.  “Sure you’re killed with the load you have!  This is a rough owld place for a lady to be walkin’.  Sit down, Miss.  God knows you have a right to be tired.”

It seemed that with Croppy also the day was dragging, doubtless he too had lunched on Mrs. Coolahan’s pork.  He planted my camp-stool and I sank upon it.

“Well, now, for all it’s so throublesome,” he resumed, “I’d say painting was a nice thrade.  There was a gintleman here one time that was a painther—­I used to be dhrivin’ him.  Faith! there wasn’t a place in the counthry but he had it pathrolled.  He seen me mother one day—­cleaning fish, I b’lieve she was, below on the quay—­an’ nothing would howld him but he should dhraw out her picture!” Croppy laughed unfilially.  “Well, me mother was mad.  ‘To the divil I pitch him!’ says she; ’if I wants me photograph drew out I’m liable to pay for it,’ says she, ‘an’ not to be stuck up before the ginthry to be ped for the like o’ that!’ ’Tis for; you bein’ so handsome!’ says I to her.  She was black mad altogether then.  ‘If that’s the way,’ says she, ’it’s a wondher he wouldn’t ax yerself, ye rotten little rat,’ says she, ’in place of thrying could he make a show of yer poor little ugly little cock-nosed mother!’ ‘Faith!’ says I to her, ’I wouldn’t care if the divil himself axed it, if he give me a half-crown and nothing to do but to be sittin’ down!’”

The tale may or may not have been intended to have a personal application, but Croppy’s fat scarlet face and yellow moustache, bristling beneath a nose which he must have inherited from his mother, did not lend themselves to a landscape background, and I fell to fugitive pencil sketches of the old white car-horse as he grazed round us.  It was thus that I first came to notice a fact whose bearing upon our fortunes I was far from suspecting.  The old horse’s harness was of dingy brown leather, with dingier brass mountings; it had been frequently mended, in varying shades of brown, and, in remarkable contrast to the rest of the outfit, the breeching was of solid and well-polished black leather, with silver buckles.  It was not so much the discrepancy of the breeching as its respectability that jarred upon me; finally I commented upon it to Croppy.

[Illustration:  “CROPPY.”]

His cap was tilted over the maternal nose, he glanced at me sideways from under its peak.

“Sure the other breechin’ was broke, and if that owld shkin was to go the lin’th of himself without a breechin’ on him he’d break all before him!  There was some fellas took him to a funeral one time without a breechin’ on him, an’ when he seen the hearse what did he do but to rise up in the sky.”

Wherein lay the moral support of a breeching in such a contingency it is hard to say.  I accepted the fact without comment, and expressed a regret that we had not been indulged with the entire set of black harness.