This language and conduct were rather new to the English clerk’s mercantile ears:  we cannot wonder that it should seem to him, as he said to his master, more the language of a madman than a man of business.  This want of punctuality in money transactions, and this mode of treating contracts as matters of favour and affection, might not have damned the fame of our hero in his own country, where such conduct is, alas! too common; but he was now in a kingdom where the manners and customs are so directly opposite, that he could meet with no allowance for his national faults.  It would be well for his countrymen if they were made, even by a few mortifications, somewhat sensible of this important difference in the habits of Irish and English traders before they come to settle in England.

But to proceed with our story.  On the night of Mr. O’Neill’s grand ball, as he was seeing his fair partner, the perfumer’s daughter, safe home, he felt himself tapped on the shoulder by no friendly hand.  When he was told that he was the king’s prisoner, he vociferated with sundry strange oaths, which we forbear to repeat.  “No, I am not the king’s prisoner!  I am the prisoner of that shabby, rascally tanner, Jonathan Hill.  None but he would arrest a gentleman in this way, for a trifle not worth mentioning.”

Miss Jenny Brown screamed when she found herself under the protection of a man who was arrested; and, what between her screams and his oaths, there was such a disturbance that a mob gathered.

Among this mob there was a party of Irish haymakers, who, after returning late from a hard day’s work, had been drinking in a neighbouring ale-house.  With one accord they took part with their countryman, and would have rescued him from the civil officers with all the pleasure in life if he had not fortunately possessed just sufficient sense and command of himself to restrain their party spirit, and to forbid them, as they valued his life and reputation, to interfere, by word or deed, in his defence.

He then despatched one of the haymakers home to his mother, to inform her of what had happened, and to request that she would get somebody to be bail for him as soon as possible, as the officers said they could not let him out of their sight till he was bailed by substantial people, or till the debt was discharged.

The widow O’Neill was just putting out the candles in the ball-room when this news of her son’s arrest was brought to her.  We pass over Hibernian exclamations:  she consoled her pride by reflecting that it would certainly be the most easy thing imaginable to procure bail for Mr. O’Neill in Hereford, where he had so many friends who had just been dancing at his house; but to dance at his house she found was one thing and to be bail for him quite another.  Each guest sent excuses, and the widow O’Neill was astonished at what never fails to astonish everybody when it happens to themselves.  “Rather than let my son be detained in this manner for a paltry debt,” cried she, “I’d sell all I have within half an hour to a pawnbroker.”  It was well no pawnbroker heard this declaration:  she was too warm to consider economy.  She sent for a pawnbroker, who lived in the same street, and, after pledging goods to treble the amount of the debt, she obtained ready money for her son’s release.