‘And the military holloaing for reinforcements,’ exclaimed Con.  ’Pheu!  Phil!’

‘That’s what it comes to,’ was Philip’s answer.  ’Precautionary measures, eh?’

‘You can make them provocative.’  ‘Will you beg for India?’ ’I shall hear in an hour.’  ‘Have we got men?’

‘Always the question with us.’

‘What a country!’ sighed the captain.  ’I’d compose ye a song of old Drowsylid, except that it does no good to be singing it at the only time when you can show her the consequences of her sluggery.  A country of compromise goes to pieces at the first cannon-shot of the advance, and while she’s fighting on it’s her poor business to be putting herself together again:  So she makes a mess of the beginning, to a certainty.  If it weren’t that she had the army of Neptune about her—­’

’The worst is she may some day start awake to discover that her protecting deity ’s been napping too.—­A boy or girl did you say, my dear?’

His wife replied:  ‘A son.’

‘Ah! more births.’  The captain appeared to be computing.  ’But this one’s out of England:  and it’s a prince I suppose they’ll call him:  and princes don’t count in the population for more than finishing touches, like the crossing of t’s and dotting of i’s, though true they’re the costliest, like some flowers and feathers, and they add to the lump on Barney’s back.  But who has any compassion for a burdened donkey? unless when you see him standing immortal meek!  Well, and a child of some sort must have been expected?  Because it’s no miracle after marriage:  worse luck for the crowded earth!’

‘Things may not be expected which are profoundly distasteful,’ Mrs. Adister remarked.

‘True,’ said her sympathetic husband. ’’Tis like reading the list of the dead after a battle where you’ve not had the best of it—­each name ’s a startling new blow.  I’d offer to run to Earlsfont, but here’s my company you would have me join for the directoring of it, you know, my dear, to ballast me, as you pretty clearly hinted; and all ’s in the city to-day like a loaf with bad yeast, thick as lead, and sour to boot.  And a howl and growl coming off the wilds of Old Ireland!  We’re smitten to-day in our hearts and our pockets, and it ’s a question where we ought to feel it most, for the sake of our families.’

‘Do you not observe that your cousins are not eating?’ said his wife, adding, to Patrick:  ’I entertain the opinion that a sound breakfast-appetite testifies to the proper vigour of men.’

‘Better than a doctor’s pass:  and to their habits likewise,’ Captain Con winked at his guests, begging them to steal ten minutes out of the fray for the inward fortification of them.

Eggs in the shell, and masses of eggs, bacon delicately thin and curling like Apollo’s locks at his temples, and cutlets, caviar, anchovies in the state of oil, were pressed with the captain’s fervid illustrations upon the brothers, both meditatively nibbling toast and indifferent to the similes he drew and applied to life from the little fish which had their sharpness corrected but not cancelled by the improved liquid they swam in.  ‘Like an Irishman in clover,’ he said to his wife to pay her a compliment and coax an acknowledgement:  ’just the flavour of the salt of him.’