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"Well," the old soldier confessed, "it seemed to me that if he wanted to fool his money away at cards or any other divilment, Tobias Clutterbuck might as well have the handling of it as any one else. Bedad, he's as cunning as a basketful of monkeys. He plays a safe game for low stakes, and never throws away a chance.
"The men won't be tryin' any o' their tricks, I bes t'inkin'. Dick Lynch bain't fit for any divilment yet awhile an' 'tothers be busy gettin' timber for the church. Send Cormy to tell Bill Brennen an' Nick Leary to keep 'em to it." "Why bes ye goin' yerself, Denny?" inquired the old woman. "Sure, it bes safest for me to carry the letter, Granny," returned the skipper.
"Flarin' up rael strong," she said, pushing towards her, as if in confirmation of the statement, the little wooden clothes-horse, whose rails were blackened and charred. "Aisy it may be," Big Anne said, looking aghast at it, "but dreadful divilment it is to do such a thing, wid the misfort'nit people very apt to lose their lives, let alone everythin' else."
The whiskey was given us an' we was ready for any divilment. That's the long and short of it." Squire Hawkins now rose slowly to his feet and looked upon the audience before him. "Gentlemen," he began, "I do not see any reason why I should prolong this enquiry. These men have confessed everything, and there is nothing more for me to do except to impose the penalties.
Isn't it enough for one day to have three young fellows in the house trying to get shot, and soldiers outside trying to shoot them, and every sort of divilment in the way of a row going on, without having a pack of girls bellowing and bawling on the kitchen stairs? And now when there's men enough outside and in, nothing will do but to be screeching.
"Queer enough," he answered, "and the members was as queer in some ways. Nothing would do them, but they must spend their time underground, sitting at tables shaped like coffins, and drinking their liquor out of mugs shaped like skulls. I was steward there a long time, and got good pay; but I never approved of the notion. It always seemed like divilment to me, did that."
I had reason fer thinkin' that way till I met Annie Bragin. 'Time an' agin whin I was blandandherin' in the dusk a man wud go past me as quiet as a cat. "That's quare," thinks I, "for I am, or I should be, the only man in these parts. Now what divilment can Annie be up to?" Thin I called myself a blayguard for thinkin' such things; but I thought thim all the same.
There was Foxey Jack Quinn; but he run away an' done for himself in the flurry. Here bes Dick Lynch, nigh as treacherous an' full o' divilment as ever Jack was, growlin' an' snarlin' at me heels like a starvin' husky an' showin' his teeth every now an' agin. So I wants to know, Pat, will I kill him dead or run him out o' the harbor?
The work of these ladies, be it said by the way, is in the line of descent from that group of older Irish novelists who wrote in the spirit of the devil-may-care gentry, the novelists from Maxwell to Lover and Lever, who were ever questing "divilment and divarshion," and who in their moods of boisterous fun forgot the real Irishman, and presented in his place a caricature him of the Celtic screech and the exhilarating whack of the shillelagh, the famous stage Irishman who has made occasional appearances in English literature from the time of Shakespeare's Henry V., on through the works of Fielding and the plays of Sheridan, to the present moment of writing.
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