The captain’s cabin was the crown of his house-top, a builder’s addition to the roof, where the detestable deeds he revelled in, calling them liberty, could be practised, according to the convention, and no one save rosy Mary, in her sense of smell, when she came upon her morning business to clean and sweep, be any the wiser of them, because, as it is known to the whole world, smoke ascends, and he was up among the chimneys.  Here, he would say to his friends and fellow-sinners, you can unfold, unbosom, explode, do all you like, except caper, and there ’s a small square of lead between the tiles outside for that, if the spirit of the jig comes upon you with violence, as I have had it on me, and eased myself mightily there, to my own music; and the capital of the British Empire below me.  Here we take our indemnity for subjection to the tyrannical female ear, and talk like copious rivers meandering at their own sweet will.  Here we roll like dogs in carrion, and no one to sniff at our coats.  Here we sing treason, here we flout reason, night is out season at half-past ten.

This introductory ode to Freedom was his throwing off of steam, the foretaste of what he contained.  He rejoined his cousins, chirping variations on it, and attired in a green silken suit of airy Ottoman volume, full of incitement to the legs and arms to swing and set him up for a Sultan.  ‘Now Phil, now Pat,’ he cried, after tenderly pulling the door to and making sure it was shut, ’any tale you’ve a mind for—­infamous and audacious!  You’re licensed by the gods up here, and may laugh at them too, and their mothers and grandmothers, if the fit seizes ye, and the heartier it is the greater the exemption.  We’re pots that knock the lid and must pour out or boil over and destroy the furniture.  My praties are ready for peelin’, if ever they were in this world!  Chuck wigs from sconces, and off with your buckram.  Decency’s a dirty petticoat in the Garden of Innocence.  Naked we stand, boys! we’re not afraid of nature.  You’re in the annexe of Erin, Pat, and devil a constable at the keyhole; no rats; I’ll say that for the Government, though it’s a despotism with an iron bridle on the tongue outside to a foot of the door.  Arctic to freeze the boldest bud of liberty!  I’d like a French chanson from ye, Pat, to put us in tune, with a right revolutionary hurling chorus, that pitches Kings’ heads into the basket like autumn apples.  Or one of your hymns in Gaelic sung ferociously to sound as horrid to the Saxon, the wretch.  His reign ’s not for ever; he can’t enter here.  You’re in the stronghold defying him.  And now cigars, boys, pipes; there are the boxes, there are the bowls.  I can’t smoke till I have done steaming.  I’ll sit awhile silently for the operation.  Christendom hasn’t such a man as your cousin Con for feeling himself a pig-possessed all the blessed day, acting the part of somebody else, till it takes me a quarter of an hour of my enfranchisement and restoration of my natural man to know myself again.  For the moment, I’m froth, scum, horrid boiling hissing dew of the agony of transformation; I am; I’m that pig disgorging the spirit of wickedness from his poor stomach.’