what the
English are like, God help them!"

It was because of his strong feeling for Ireland and Irish things that
he decided to have his son, Henry, educated in Ireland. "Anyway," he
said to the lad, "you'll have an Irish tongue, whatever else you have!"
He sent the boy to a school in the County Armagh and left him there
until he discovered that he was not being educated at all. He had
questioned Henry on the history and geography of Ireland one day, and
had found to his horror that while Henry could tell him exactly where
Popocatepetl was to be found, and knew that Mount Everest was 29,002
feet high, and could name the kings of England and the dates of their
accession as easily as he could recite the Lord's Prayer, he had no
knowledge of the whereabouts or character of Lurigedan, a hill in the
County Antrim, and could tell him nothing of the Red Earls and the
beautiful queens of Ireland. He knew something that was true, and much
that was not, of Queen Elizabeth and King Alfred, but nothing, true or
false, of Deirdre and Red Hugh O'Neill.

"What the hell's the good of knowin' about Popocatepetl," Mr. Quinn
shouted at him, "when you don't know the name of a hill on your own
doorstep!"

Lurigedan was hardly "on his own doorstep," and Mr. Quinn himself only
knew of it because he had once, very breathlessly, climbed to its
summit, but an Irish hill was of more consequence to him than the
highest mountain in the world; and so he descended upon the master of
the school, a dreepy individual with a tendency to lament the errors of
Rome, and damned him from tip to toe so effectually that the alarmed
pedagogue gladly consented to the immediate termination of Henry's
career at his establishment. Thereafter, Henry was educated in England,
for Mr. Quinn did not propose to sacrifice efficiency to patriotism.

"An' if you come back talkin' like a damned Cockney," he said to his son
as he bade good-bye to him, "I'll cut the legs off you!"

When Henry came home in the holidays, Mr. Quinn would spend hours in
testing his tongue.

"Sound your _r_s," he would say repeatedly, because he regarded one's
ability to say the letter _r_ as a test of a man's control of the
English language. "If you were to listen to an Englishman talkin' on the
telephone, you'd hear him yelpin' _'Ah yoh thah?'_ just like a big buck
nigger, 'til you'd be sick o' listenin' to him! Say, '_Are you there?_',
Henry son!"

And Henry would say _"Are you there_,