‘Oh! what am I to do, captain, jewel?’ she bounced into the room, with flaming face and eyes swelled, and the end of her apron, with which she had been swobbing them, in her hand, while she gesticulated, with her right; ’there, he’s off again to Island Bridge,—­the owdacious sneak!  It’s all that dirty hussy’s doing.  I’m not such a fool, but I know how to put this and that together, though he thinks I don’t know of his doings; but I’ll be even with you, Meg Partlet, yet—­you trollop;’ and all this was delivered in renewed floods of tears, and stentorian hysterics, while she shook her fat red fist in the air, at the presumed level of Meg’s beautiful features.

‘Nay, Madam,’ said the gay captain; ’I prithee, weep not; the like discoveries, as you have read, have been made in Rome, Salamanca, Ballyporeen, Babylon, Venice, and fifty other famous cities.’  He always felt in these interviews, as if she and he were extemporising a burlesque—­she the Queen of Crim Tartary, and he an Archbishop in her court—­and would have spoken blank verse, only he feared she might perceive it, and break up the conference.

’And what’s that to the purpose?—­don’t I know they’re the same all over the world—­nothing but brutes and barbarians.’

’But suppose, Madam, he has only gone up the river, and just taken his rod——­’

‘Oh! rod, indeed.  I know where he wants a rod, the rascal!’

‘I tell you, Madam,’ urged the chaplain, ’you’re quite in the wrong.  You’ve discovered after twenty years’ wedlock that your husband’s—­a man! and you’re vexed:  would you have him anything else?’

‘You’re all in a story,’ she blubbered maniacally; ’there’s no justice, nor feeling, nor succour for a poor abused woman; but I’ll do it—­I will.  I’ll go to his reverence—­don’t try to persuade me—­the Rev. Hugh Walsingham, Doctor of Divinity, and Rector of Chapelizod (she used to give him at full length whenever she threatened Zekiel with a visitation from that quarter, by way of adding ponderosity to the menace)—­I’ll go to him straight—­don’t think to stop me—­and we’ll see what he’ll say;’ and so she addressed herself to go.

’And when you see him, Madam, ask the learned doctor—­don’t ask me—­believe the rector of the parish—­he’ll tell you, that it hath prevailed from the period at which Madam Sarah quarrelled with saucy Miss Hagar; that it hath prevailed among all the principal nations of antiquity, according to Pliny, Strabo, and the chief writers of antiquity; that Juno, Dido, Eleanor Queen of England, and Mrs. Partridge, whom I read of here (and he pointed to the open volume of Tom Jones), each made, or thought she made, a like discovery.’  And the captain delivered this slowly, with knitted brow and thoughtful face, after the manner of the erudite and simple doctor.

‘Pretty Partridges, indeed! and nice game for a parish clerk!’ cried the lady, returning.  ’I wonder, so I do, when I look at him, and think of his goings on, how he can have the assurance to sit under the minister, and look the congregation in the face, and tune his throat, and sing the blessed psalms.’