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Updated: June 27, 2025
Strange beetles beetles from other families, with no claim on us whatever got to hear about the thing, and came in hordes, and tried to rob our blackbeetles of it. By the end of a week we had lured into our kitchen every beetle that wasn't lame for miles round. MacShaughnassy said it was a good thing. We should clear the suburb at one swoop.
Ethelbertha and I sat down, one each side of our cheerless hearth, and looked at one another, and thought of MacShaughnassy, until Amenda chimed in on our despair with one of those practical suggestions of hers that she occasionally threw out for us to accept or not, as we chose. "Maybe," said she, "I'd better light it in the old way just for to-day." "Do, Amenda," said Ethelbertha, rising.
Nowadays 'slumming' is the most applauded virtue, and so all our best heroines go slumming, and are 'good to the poor." "How useful 'the poor' are," remarked MacShaughnassy, somewhat abruptly, placing his feet on the mantelpiece, and tilting his chair back till it stood at an angle that caused us to rivet our attention upon it with hopeful interest.
"Well," answered MacShaughnassy, "if one admits the possibility of spirits retaining any interest in the affairs of this world at all, it is certainly more reasonable to imagine them engaged upon a task such as you suggest, than to believe that they occupy themselves with the performance of mere drawing-room tricks. But what are you leading up to?"
MacShaughnassy was staying with us at the time, and on the Friday evening he mixed us a salad, according to a recipe given him by his aunt. On the Saturday morning, everybody was, of course, very ill. Everybody always is very ill after partaking of any dish prepared by MacShaughnassy. Some people attempt to explain this fact by talking glibly of "cause and effect."
MacShaughnassy, if you could 'ave 'eard 'er; she was makin' fun of the pictures and the people round about to 'er pa such wit, such learnin', such 'aughtiness. I follered them out and opened the carriage door for 'er, and she just drew 'er skirt aside and looked at me as if I was the dirt in the road. I wish I was, for then perhaps one day I'd kiss 'er feet.
"Of course I can," said MacShaughnassy; "I can imagine anything, and believe anything of anybody. It is only in novels that people act reasonably and in accordance with what might be expected of them. I knew an old sea-captain who used to read the Young Ladies' Journal in bed, and cry over it.
Brown rose as he finished speaking, and mixed himself a glass of whisky and water with the self-satisfied air of a benevolent man about to reward somebody for having done a good deed; and MacShaughnassy lifted up his voice and talked. "I know a story bearing on the subject, too," he said. "It happened in a tiny Yorkshire village a peaceful, respectable spot, where folks found life a bit slow.
On the present occasion she stood quietly by while the MacShaughnassy method of fire-laying was expounded to her. When Ethelbertha had finished she simply said: "You want me to lay the fires like that?" "Yes, Amenda, we'll always have the fires laid like that in future, if you please." "All right, mum," replied Amenda, with perfect unconcern, and there the matter ended, for that evening.
Where would you all be, I should like to know, you canting swine, if it wasn't for me and my sort? Why, it's the likes of me as keeps the likes of you, with which he walked straight to the gallows and told the hangman to 'hurry up' and not keep the gentlemen waiting." "There was some 'grit' in that man," said MacShaughnassy. "Yes," added Jephson, "and wholesome wit also."
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