‘I’d like there was—­an’ if you mislike it, neighbour, there’s the door.’

If he expected a quarrel, however, it did not come; and he saw by Irons’s wandering eye, fierce as it looked, that his thoughts for the moment were elsewhere.  And just then the songster, having wiped his mouth in his coat-sleeve, started afresh in these terms—­

  ’"You’ll walk the world with a dreadful knowledge,
    And a heavy heart and a frowning brow;
  And thinking deeper than a man in college,
    Your eye will deaden, and your back will bow.

  ’"And when the pariod iv your life is over,
    The frightful hour of judgment then will be;
  And, Shamus Hanlon, heavy on your shoulder,
    I’ll lay my cowld hand, and you’ll go wid me."’

This awful ditty died away in the prolonged drone which still finds favour in the ears of our Irish rustic musicians, and the company now began to talk of congenial themes, murders, ghosts, and retributions, and the horrid tune went dismally booming on in Mr. Irons’s ear.

Trifling, and apparently wholly accidental, as was this occurrence, the musical and moral treat had a very permanent effect upon the fortunes of Irons, and those of other persons who figure in our story.  Mr. Irons had another and another glass of punch.  They made him only more malign and saturnine.  He sat in his corner by the fire, silent and dismal; and no one cared what was passing in the brain behind that black and scowling mask.  He paid sternly and furiously, like a villain who has lost at play; and without a ‘good-night,’ or any other leave taking, glided ominously from the room; and the gentlemen who carried on the discourse and convivialities of the Salmon House, followed him with a gibe or two, and felt the pleasanter for the removal of that ungracious presence.

A few minutes later, Mr. Lowe stood on the hall-door step, and calling to his man, gave him a little note and some silver, and a message—­very impressively repeated—­and the groom touched his hat, and buttoned up his coat about his neck, the wind being from the east, and he started, at something very near a gallop, for Dublin.

There was a man at the door of the Salmon House, who, with a taciturn and saturnine excitement, watched the unusual bustle going on at the door-steps of Doctor Sturk’s dwelling.  This individual had been drinking there for a while; and having paid his shot, stood with his back to the wall, and his hands in his pockets, profoundly agitated, and with a chaos of violent and unshaped thoughts rising and rolling in his darkened brain.

After Lowe went into the house again, seeing the maid still upon the steps, talking with Mr. Moore, the barber, who was making his lingering adieux there, this person drew near, and just as the tonsor made his final farewell, and strode down the street towards his own dwelling, he presented himself in time to arrest the retreat of the damsel.