"They were a bad fit for me, anyway," returned James, glancing over his shoulder at the clattering operations of his two female subordinates, with the eye of the sergeant-major--the eye that always contains a grievance. "I was a footman with the old Lord Garretmore that time. Sure that was where the chandelier came from. A grand house it was, too--big slobs of marble on the tables, and gold legs under them, and ye'd bog to the knees in the carpets. Well, it was the first night after me getting the teeth, there was a gentleman stayed for dinner, and he was to go away by the night train. Forty horses were in the stables, and there wasn't one but was out at grass, and I had to go out beating the bushes for an old mare that was round the house always, herself and her foal, to put her under the side car. 'Prua! Prua!' says I, calling the mare in the dark, and with that the teeth lepped out of my mouth, with respects to you!" "Oh, fie!" said the mother of the young lady. "What did you do then, James?" inquired the Doctor. "I took the white tie off me, and I tied it to the bush that was next me, for a token, and 'twas that way I got them again the next morning, thanks be to God." Having concluded his story, James started on a perfunctory tour of the table with the wine card. He stopped to pull the turf fire together, and, with a furtive eye at the glass over the chimney-piece, he rearranged the long lock of hair that draped his bald pate. It was dyed, of that peculiar shade of chestnut that disdains subterfuge, and the fact and its suggestions were distressing where an old servant was concerned; so also was the manner in which he hobbled on his heels. "His walk's full of corns," said the young doctor, eyeing him not without sympathy. "He's a great old character. I believe they keep him here to talk to the tourists." It is a melancholy fact that in Ireland, in these later days, "characters" have become aware of their position, and palpably live up to their reputation. But James was in a class of his own. I said didactically, even combatively, that "characters" were free and easy, but that James was easy without being free. "I'll bet he's not easy in his feet, anyhow!" said the Doctor brutally. "Have you any more soup there, James?" The mother of the young lady, who had hitherto preserved a silence, broken only by the audible assimilation of her soup, here laid down her spoon and said in cryptic disparagement: "Tin!" "Well, I'd say it was the best we had yet," said the Doctor. "I'd undertake to pull a puppy through distemper with it." "That's the soup she has always for th'assizes," said James. "Grand soup it is, and I declare to ye, she makes it out of egg shells and every old rubbish!" The young lady's mother emitted a short laugh, but her empty soup-plate told heavily against her. The meal wore slowly on. A sea fish, of a genus unknown to me, and amazingly endowed with bones, was consumed in distracted silence.