ent
affluence was the long-expected remittance from his estates. "We 'll
get right yet," muttered he, "if they 'll only give us time; but ye see,
this is the way it is: we're like an overloaded beast that can't pull
his cart through the mud, and then the English comes up, and thrashes
us. By course, we get weaker and weaker--licking and abusing never made
any one strong yet. At last down we come on our knees with a smash.
Well, ye 'd think, then, that anybody with a grain of sense would say,
'Take some of the load off the poor devil's back--ease him a bit tell he
gets strength.' Nothing of the kind. All they do is to tell us that we
ought to be ashamed of ourselves for falling--that every other people
was doing well but ourselves--that it's a way we have of lying down,
just to get somebody to pick us up, and such like. And the blaguard
newspapers raises the cry against us, and devil a thief or a
housebreaker or a highway robber they take, that they don't put him
down in the police reports as a 'hulking Irishman,' or a 'native of the
Emerald Isle.' 'Paddy Fitzsimons, or Peter O'Shea, was brought up this
mornin' for cutting off his wife's head with a trowel.' 'Molly Maguire
was indicted for scraping her baby to death with an oyster-shell.'
That's the best word they have for us! 'Ain't ye the plague of our
lives?' they're always saying. 'Do ye ever give us a moment's peace?'
And why the blazes don't ye send us adrift, then? Why don't ye let us
take our own road? We don't want your company--faix! we never found
it too agreeable. It's come to that now, that it would better be a
Hottentot or a Chinese than an Irishman! Oh dear, oh dear, but we 're
hardly treated!"

"Will you run your eye over that paper, Herr von Dalton, and see if it
be all correct?" said Abel, handing him a very complex-looking array of
figures.

"'T is little the wiser I 'll be when I do," muttered Dalton to himself,
as he put on his spectacles and affected to consider the statement.
"Fourteen hundred and sixty-three----I wish they were pounds, but they
're only florins--and two thousand eight hundred and twenty-one--five
and two is seven and nine is fifteen. No, seven and nine is--I wish
Nelly was here. Bad luck to the multiplication-table. I used to be
licked for it every day when I was a boy, and it's been a curse to me
since I was a man. Seven and nine is fourteen, or thereabouts--a figure
would n't signify much, one way or f other. Interest at three