ty pratees, Mrs. Rooney; God save you, ma'am!"

"'Deed an' they are--thank you kindly, Mr. Hogan; God save you and
yours too! And how would the woman that owns you be?"

"Hearty, thank you."

"Will you step in?"

"No, I'm obleeged to you--I must be aff home wid me; but I'll just get
a coal for my pipe, for it wint out on me awhile agone with the
fright."

"Well, I've heer'd quare things, Larry Hogan," said Oonah, laughing and
showing her white teeth; "but I never heer'd so quare a thing as a pipe
goin' out with the fright."

"Oh, how sharp you are!--takin' one up afore they're down."

"Not afore they're down, Larry; for you said it."

"Well, if I was down, you were down _on_ me; so you are down too, you
see. Ha, ha! And afther all now, Oonah, a pipe is like a Christian in
many ways: sure it's made o' clay like a Christian, and has the spark
o' life in it, and while the breath is in it the spark is alive; but
when the breath is out of it the spark dies, and then it grows cowld
like a Christian; and isn't it a pleasant companion like a Christian?"

"Faix, some Christians isn't pleasant companions at all!" chimed in
Mrs. Rooney, sententiously.

"Well, but they ought to be," said Larry; "and isn't a pipe sometimes
cracked like a Christian, and isn't it sometimes choked liked a
Christian?"

"Oh, choke you and your pipe together, Larry! will you never have
done?" said the widow.

"The most improvinist thing in the world is smokin'," said Larry, who
had now relit his pipe, and squatted himself on a three-legged stool
beside the widow's fire. "The most improvinist in the world"--(paugh!)--and
a parenthetical whiff of tobacco-smoke curled out of the corner of
Larry's mouth--"is smokin': for the smoke shows you, as it were, the
life o' man passin' away like a puff--(paugh!)--just like that; and the
tibakky turns to ashes like his poor perishable body; for, as the song
says--

"'Tibakky is an Indian weed,
Alive at morn and dead at eve;
It lives but an hour,
Is cut down like a flower,
Think o' this when you're smoking tiba-akky!'"

And Larry sung the ditty as he crammed some of the weed into the bowl
of his pipe with his little finger.

"Why, you're as good as a sarmint this evenin', Larry," said the widow,
as she lifted the iron pot on the fire.

"There's worse sarmints nor that, I can tell you," rejoined Larry, who
took up the old song again--

"'A pip