The explanation over, a long silence ensued--each afraid to pop the question, which must be popp'd, of whose wife was Nancy? and when, at last, it did come out, it was more easily asked than answered, for, notwithstanding all that had passed, they continued both to be deeply enamoured of their mutual wife, and she of both, nor could a voluntary resignation be extracted from either of them, so that they were eventually obliged to trust the winning or the losing of that greatest of all earthly blessings, (a beloved wife,) to the undignified decision of the toss of a halfpenny. The marine won, and carried off the prize--while the rifleman declared that he had never yet forgiven himself for being cheated out of his half, for he feels convinced that the marine had come there prepared with a ha'penny that had two tails. The tail of the foregoing story was caught up by a _Patlander_ with--"Well! the devil fetch me if I would have let her gone that way any how, if the marine had brought twenty tails with his ha'penny!--but you see I was kicked out of the only wife I never had without ere a chance of being married at all. "Kitty, you see, was an apprentice to Miss Crump, who keeps that thundering big milliner's shop in Sackville-street, and I was Mike Kinahan's boy at the next door--so you see, whenever it was Kitty's turn to carry out one of them great blue boxes with thingumbobs for the ladies, faith, I always contrived to steal away for a bit, to give Kitty a lift, and the darling looked so kind and so grateful for't that I was at last quite kilt!" I must here take up the thread of Paddy's story for the same reasons given in the last, and inform the reader that, though he himself had received the finishing blow, he was far from satisfied that Kitty's case was equally desperate, for, notwithstanding her grateful looks, they continued to be more like those of a mistress to an obliging servant than of a sweetheart. As for a kiss, he could not get any thing like one even by coaxing, and the greatest bliss he experienced, in the course of his love making, was in the interchange among the fingers which the frequent transfer of the band-box permitted, and which Pat declared went quite through and through him.