As the Jew grew deeper in his figures, Dalton rambled on about Ireland and her prospects, for he wished it to be supposed that his present affluence was the long-expected remittance from his estates. “We 'll get right yet,” muttered he, “if they 'll only give us time; but ye see, this is the way it is: we're like an overloaded beast that can't pull his cart through the mud, and then the English comes up, and thrashes us. By course, we get weaker and weaker--licking and abusing never made any one strong yet. At last down we come on our knees with a smash. Well, ye 'd think, then, that anybody with a grain of sense would say, 'Take some of the load off the poor devil's back--ease him a bit tell he gets strength.' Nothing of the kind. All they do is to tell us that we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for falling--that every other people was doing well but ourselves--that it's a way we have of lying down, just to get somebody to pick us up, and such like. And the blaguard newspapers raises the cry against us, and devil a thief or a housebreaker or a highway robber they take, that they don't put him down in the police reports as a 'hulking Irishman,' or a 'native of the Emerald Isle.' 'Paddy Fitzsimons, or Peter O'Shea, was brought up this mornin' for cutting off his wife's head with a trowel.' 'Molly Maguire was indicted for scraping her baby to death with an oyster-shell.' That's the best word they have for us! 'Ain't ye the plague of our lives?' they're always saying. 'Do ye ever give us a moment's peace?' And why the blazes don't ye send us adrift, then? Why don't ye let us take our own road? We don't want your company--faix! we never found it too agreeable. It's come to that now, that it would better be a Hottentot or a Chinese than an Irishman! Oh dear, oh dear, but we 're hardly treated!” “Will you run your eye over that paper, Herr von Dalton, and see if it be all correct?” said Abel, handing him a very complex-looking array of figures. “'T is little the wiser I 'll be when I do,” muttered Dalton to himself, as he put on his spectacles and affected to consider the statement. “Fourteen hundred and sixty-three----I wish they were pounds, but they 're only florins--and two thousand eight hundred and twenty-one--five and two is seven and nine is fifteen. No, seven and nine is--I wish Nelly was here. Bad luck to the multiplication-table. I used to be licked for it every day when I was a boy, and it's been a curse to me since I was a man. Seven and nine is fourteen, or thereabouts--a figure would n't signify much, one way or f other. Interest at three-quarters for twenty-one days--there I 'm done complete! Out of the four first rules in Gough I'm a child, and indeed, to tell the truth, I 'm no great things after subtraction.” “You will perceive that I make the charges for postage, commission, and other expenses in one sum. This little claim of fifty-eight florins covers all.”