His honour nodded permission, and Mr. Sullivan immediately began a defence, to which it is impossible to do justice; so exuberantly did he suit the action to the word, and the word to the action. "Och! your honour, there is something the matter with me!" he began; at the same time putting two of his fingers perpendicularly over his forehead to intimate that Mrs. Sullivan had played him false. He then went into a long story about a "_Misther Burke_" who lodged in his house, and had taken the liberty of assisting him in his conjugal duties, "without any lave from _him_ at all." It was one night in _partickler_, he said, that he himself went to bed betimes in the little back parlour, quite entirely sick with the head-ache. _Misther_ Burke was out from home; and when the shop was shut up, Mrs. Sullivan went out too: but he didn't much care for that, _ounly_ he thought she might as well have staid at home, and so he couldn't go to sleep for thinking of it. "Well, at one o'clock in the morning," he continued, lowering his voice into a sort of loud whisper; "at one o'clock in the morning, Misther Burke lets himself in with the key that he had, and goes up to bed--and I thought nothing at all; but presently I hears something come, tap, tap, tap, at the street door. The minute after, down comes Misther Burke, and opens the door, and sure it was Mary--Misthress Sullivan that _is_, more's the pity--and devil a bit she came to see after me in the little back parlour at all, but upstairs she goes after Misther Burke.--'Och!' says I, 'but there's something the mather with me this night!'--and I got up with the night-cap o' th' head o' me, and went into the shop to see for a knife, but I couldn't get one by no manes. So I creeps upstairs, step by step, step by step, (here Mr. Sullivan walked on tip-toe all across the office, to show the magistrate how quietly he went up the stairs,) and when I gets to the top, I sees 'em--by the _gash_ (gas) coming through the chink in the windy-curtains--I sees 'em; and 'Och! Misthress Sullivan!' says he; and 'Och! Misther Burke!' says she--and 'Och botheration!' says I to myself, 'and what will I do now?'" We cannot follow Mr. Sullivan any further in the _detail_ of his melancholy affair; it is sufficient that he saw enough to convince him that he was dishonoured; that by some accident or other, he disturbed the guilty pair, whereupon Mrs. Sullivan crept under Mr. Burke's bed, to hide herself; that Mr. Sullivan rushed into the room and dragged her from under the bed, by her "wicked leg;" and that he felt about the round table in the corner, where Mr. Burke kept his bread and cheese, in the hope of finding a _knife_. "And what would you have done with it if you had found it?" asked his worship.