ns.

'Well, and look at it,' replied he, bristling up; 'and what have you to
say agin it? Isn't it the Grand Canal Hotel?'

'Yes; but,' said I conciliatingly, 'an hotel ought at least to have a
landlord, or a landlady.'

'And what do you call my mother there?' said he, with indignant energy.

'Don't bate Corny, sir! don't strike the child!' screamed the old woman,
in an accent of heart-rending terror. 'Sure he doesn't know what he is
saying.'

'He is telling me it isn't the Grand Canal Hotel, mother,' shouted Corny
in the old lady's ears, while at the same moment he burst into a fit
of the most discordant laughter. By some strange sympathy the old woman
joined in, and I myself, unable to resist the ludicrous effect of a
scene which still had touched my feelings, gave way also, and thus we
all three laughed on for several minutes.

Suddenly recovering himself in the midst of his cachin-nations, Corny
turned briskly round, fixed his fiery eyes upon me, and said--

'And did you come all the way from town to laugh at my mother and me?'

I hastened to exonerate myself from such a charge, and in a few words
informed him of the object of my journey, whither I was going, and under
what painful delusion I laboured, in supposing the internal arrangements
of the Grand Canal Hotel bore any relation to its imposing exterior.

'I thought I could have dined here?'

'No, you can't,' was the reply, 'av ye're not fond of herrins.'

'And had a bed too?'

'Nor that either, av ye don't like straw.'

'And has your mother nothing better than that?' said I, pointing to the
miserable plate of fish.

'Whisht, I tell you, and don't be putting the like in her head:
sometimes she hears as well as you or me.' Here he dropped his voice
to a whisper. 'Herrins is so cheap that we always make her believe it's
Lent--this is nine years now she's fasting.' Here a fit of laughing at
the success of this innocent ruse again broke from Corny, in which, as
before, his mother joined.

'Then what am I to do,' asked I, 'if I can get nothing to eat here? Is
there no other house in the village?'

'No, devil a one.'

'How far is it to Loughrea?'

'Fourteen miles and a bit.'

'I can get a car, I suppose?'

'Ay, if Mary Doolan's boy is not gone back.'

The old woman, whose eyes were impatiently fixed upon me during this
colloquy, but who heard not a word of what was going forward, now broke
in--

'Why doesn't he pay the bill and go away? De