d puddings, and disport your fancy through all the varieties of roast
and boil? How would you dress a fowl that it would stand upon a dish
as if it was going to dance a hornpipe? How would you amalgamate the
different genera of wine with boiling fluid and crystallized saccharine
matter? How would you dispose of the various dishes upon the table
according to high life and mathematics? Wouldn't you be too old to bathe
my feet when I'd be unwell? Wouldn't you be too old to bring me my whey
in the morning soon as I'd awake, perhaps with a severe headache, after
the plenary indulgence of a clerical compotation? Wouldn't you be too
old to sit up till the middle of the nocturnal hour, awaiting my arrival
home? Wouldn't you be--"

"Hut, tut, that's enough, Denny, I'd never do at all. No, no, but I'll
sit a clane, dacent ould woman in the corner upon a chair that you'll
get made for me. There I'll be wid my pipe and tobacco, smokin' at my
aise, chattin' to the sarvints, and sometimes discoorsin' the neighbors
that'll come to inquire for you, when they'll be sittin' in the kitchen
waitin' till you get through your office. Jist let me have that, Dinny
achora, and I'll be as happy as the day's long."

"And I on the other side," said his father, naturally enough struck with
the happy simplicity of the picture which his wife drew, "on the other
side, Mave, a snug, dacent ould man, chattin' to you across the fire,
proud to see the bishop an' the gintlemen about him. An' I wouldn't ax
to be taken into the parlor at all, except, maybe, when there would be
nobody there but yourself, Denis; an' that your mother an' I would go
into the parlor to get a glass of punch, or, if it could be spared, a
little taste of wine for novelty."

"And so you shall, both of you--you, father, at one side of the hob,
and my mother here at the other, the king and queen of my culinarian
dominions. But practice taciturnity a little--I'm visited by the muse,
and must indulge in a strain of vocal melody--hem--'tis a few lines of
my own composure, the offspring of a moment of inspiration by the nine
female Heliconians; but before I incipiate, here's to my own celebrity
to-morrow, and afterwards all your healths!"

He then proceeded to sing in his best style a song composed, as he said,
by himself, but which, as the composition was rather an eccentric one,
we decline giving.

"Denis," said his brother, "you'll have great sport at the Station's."

"Yes, Brian,