The captain drooped to represent the state of the self-relieving victim of the evil one; but fearful lest either of his cousins should usurp the chair and thwart his chance of delivering himself, he rattled away sympathetically with his posture in melancholy:  ’Ay, we’re poor creatures; pigs and prophets, princes and people, victors and vanquished, we ’re waves of the sea, rolling over and over, and calling it life!  There’s no life save the eternal.  Father Boyle’s got the truth.  Flesh is less than grass, my sons; ’tis the shadow that crosses the grass.  I love the grass.  I could sit and watch grassblades for hours.  I love an old turf mound, where the grey grass nods and seems to know the wind and have a whisper with it, of ancient times maybe and most like; about the big chief lying underneath in the last must of his bones that a breath of air would scatter.  They just keep their skeleton shape as they are; for the turf mound protects them from troubles:  ’tis the nurse to that delicate old infant!—­Waves of the sea, did I say?  We’re wash in a hog-trough for Father Saturn to devour; big chief and suckling babe, we all go into it, calling it life!  And what hope have we of reading the mystery?  All we can see is the straining of the old fellow’s hams to push his old snout deeper into the gobble, and the ridiculous curl of a tail totally devoid of expression!  You’ll observe that gluttons have no feature; they’re jaws and hindquarters; which is the beginning and end of ’m; and so you may say to Time for his dealing with us:  so let it be a lesson to you not to bother your wits, but leave the puzzle to the priest.  He understands it, and why? because he was told.  There ’s harmony in his elocution, and there’s none in the modern drivel about where we’re going and what we came out of.  No wonder they call it an age of despair, when you see the big wigs filing up and down the thoroughfares with a great advertisement board on their shoulders, proclaiming no information to the multitude, but a blank note of interrogation addressed to Providence, as if an answer from above would be vouchsafed to their impudence!  They haven’t the first principles of good manners.  And some of ’m in a rage bawl the answer for themselves.  Hear that!  No, Phil; No, Pat, no:  devotion’s good policy.—­You’re not drinking!  Are you both of ye asleep? why do ye leave me to drone away like this, when it ’s conversation I want, as in the days of our first parents, before the fig-leaf?—­and you might have that for scroll and figure on the social banner of the hypocritical Saxon, who’s a gormandising animal behind his decency, and nearer to the Arch-devourer Time than anything I can imagine:  except that with a little exertion you can elude him.  The whisky you’ve got between you ’s virgin of the excise.  I’ll pay double for freepeaty any day.  Or are you for claret, my lads?  No?  I’m fortified up here to stand a siege in my old round tower, like the son of Eremon that I am.  Lavra Con!  Con speaks at last!