seeking for it again, to make the best of a dear market, I picked up two, and home I comes to my master, thinking he would be pleased with what I had done. "Now," said I, "master, I think I have put a trick upon them fellows for selling the letter to you." "What have you done." "I have only taken other two letters. Here's one for you, master, to help your dear penny-worth, and I'll send the other to my mother to see whether she be dead or alive, for she's always angry I don't write to her." I had not the word well spoken till he got up his stick and beat me heartily for it, and sent me back to the fellows again with the two. I had a very ill will to go, but nobody would buy them of me. _Tom._ Well, Paddy, I think you was to blame, and your master, too, for he ought to have taught you how to go about these affairs, and not beat you so. _Teag._ Arra, dear honey, I had too much wit of my own to be teached by him, or anybody else. He began to instruct me after that how I should serve the table, and such nasty things as those. One night I took ben a roasted fish in one hand and a piece of bread in the other. The old gentleman was so saucy he would not take it, and told me I should bring nothing to him without a trencher below it. The same night, as he was going to bed, he called for his slippers; so I clapt a trencher below the slippers, and ben I goes. No sooner did I enter the room than he threw the trencher at me, which broke both my head and the trencher at one blow. "Now," said I, "the evil one is in my master altogether, for what he commands at one time he countermands at another." Next day I went with him to the market to buy a sack of potatoes. I went to the potato-monger, and asked what he took for the full of a Scot's cog. He weighed them in. He asked no less than fourpence. "Fourpence!" said I; "if I were but in Dublin I could get the double of that for nothing, and in Cork and Linsale far cheaper. Them is but small things like pease," said I, "but the potatoes in my country is as big as your head--fine meat, all made up in blessed mouthfuls." The potato merchant called me a liar, and my master called me a fool; so the one fell a-kicking me and the other a-cuffing me. I was in such bad bread among them that I called myself both a liar and a fool to get off alive. _Tom._ And how did you carry your potatoes home from the market?