up, steaming from every pore, to announce that the dinner was "ready to
be sarved."

"Then sarve it, sir," said Murphy, "and sarve it right."

Off cantered Tim, steaming and snorting like a locomotive engine, and
the party followed to the inn, where a long procession of dish-bearers
was ascending the stairs to the big room, as Murphy and his friends
entered.

The dinner it is needless to describe. One dinner is the same as
another in the most essential points, namely, to satisfy hunger and
slake consequent thirst; and whether beef and cabbage, and heavy wet,
are to conquer the dragon of appetite, or your stomach is to sustain
the more elaborate attack fired from the _batterie de cuisine_ of a
finished _artiste_, and moistened with champagne, the difference is
only of degree in the fashion of the thing and the tickling of the
palate: hunger is as thoroughly satisfied with the one as the other;
and headaches as well manufactured out of the beautiful, bright, and
taper glasses which bear the foam of France to the lip, as from the
coarse, flat-bottomed tumblers of an inn that reek with punch. At the
dinner there was the same tender solicitude on the part of the carvers
as to "Where would you like it?" and the same carelessness on the part
of those whom they questioned, who declared they had no choice, "but if
there _was_ a little bit near the shank," &c., or "if there was a liver
wing to _spare_." By the way, some carvers there are who push an
aspirant's patience too far. I have seen some who, after giving away
both wings, and all the breast, two sidebones, and the short legs, meet
the eager look of the fifth man on their left with a smile, and ask
him, with an effrontery worthy of the Old Bailey, "Has he any choice?"
and, at the same time, toss a drum-stick on the destined plate, or
boldly attempt to divert his melancholy with a merry-thought. All this,
and more, was there at Murtough Murphy's dinner, long memorable in the
country from a frolic that wound up the evening, which soon began to
warm, after the cloth was removed, into the sort of a thing commonly
known by the name of a jollification. But before the dinner was over,
poor M'Garry was nearly pickled: Jack Horan, having determined to make
him drunk, arranged a system of attack on M'Garry's sobriety which bade
defiance to his prudence to withstand. It was agreed that every one
should ask the apothecary to take wine; and he, poor innocent man! when
gentlemen whom