no.

"A pianney? Yeh, for what? A priest with a pianney! Yerra, his niece is
going to live wid him. Yerra, no! He'll play it himself."

Which last interpretation was received with shouts of incredulous
laughter. What a versatile people we are! And how adoration and
laughter, and reverence and sarcasm, move side by side in our character,
apparently on good terms with each other. Will the time come when the
laughter and the wit, grown rampant, will rudely jostle aside all the
reverential elements in our nature, and mount upwards to those fatal
heights which other nations have scaled like Satan,--and thence have
been flung into the abyss?

I was curious to know what Hannah thought of it all. Hannah too is
versatile; and leaps from adoration to envy with wonderful facility.

"Father Letheby's furniture, I suppose?" I said, when she brought in the
dinner.

"I believe so," she replied, in a tone of ineffable scorn,--"a parcel of
gimcracks and kimmeens."

"I thought they looked nice from here," I said.

"Don't sit on his chairs, unless you have your will made," she said.

"Did I see a looking-glass?" I asked.

"Oh yes! to curl his hair, I suppose. And a pianney to play polkas."

"It isn't as solid as ours, Hannah," I said. This opened the
flood-gates of wrath.

"No," she said, in that accent of sarcasm in which an Irish peasant is
past master, "nor purtier. Look at that sophy now. Isn't it fit for any
lady in the land? And these chairs? Only for the smith, they'd be gone
to pieces long ago. And that lovely carpet? 'T would do for a flag for
the 'lague.' You haven't one cup and saucer that isn't cracked, nor a
plate that isn't burnt, nor a napkin, nor a tablecloth, nor a
saltcellar, nor--nor a--nor a--"

"I'll tell you what, Hannah," I said. "Father Letheby is going to show
us what's what. I'll furnish the whole house from top to bottom. Was
that his housekeeper?"

"I suppose so," she said contemptuously. "Some poor girl from an
orphanage. If she wasn't, she wouldn't wear them curifixes."

I admit that Hannah's scorn for my scanty belongings was well bestowed.
The sofa, which appeared to affect her aesthetic sense most keenly, was
certainly a dilapidated article. Having but three legs, it leaned in a
loafing way against the wall, and its rags of horsehair and protruding
springs gave it a most trampish and disreputable appearance. The chairs
were solid, for the smith had bound them in iron clamps. And the
carpe