“De ye think,” says he, “I’m not workin’ for the best--but wheniver, to make lier asy, I tell her we’ll marry out of the face, by Jakers! she kicks the harder.” “Sorra soul’s within bearin’,” says I--“so take the handkerchief out of her mouth and give her air--for maybe she’s chokin’--and that’s what makes her kick.” He did what I bid him--and, Lord! what a tongue she had when she got the use of it!--and not a word for ather of us but _thief and villain_. I disremember how she swore; but if she had been born in Connaught, the oaths couldn’t have come asier. “Ye etarnal robbers!” says she, “what do ye want? I have no money about me, and I suppose I’m to be murdered!” “We want nothing in the world,” says Dick, “but to make ye an honest woman manin’, of course, to marry her lawfully. “Make me an honest woman!--why, ye common thieves, what do ye mane?” Dick made a kind of a confused story of it, but she didn’t wait to the end. “Oh, murder! murder!” she called out--“Marry me! and get me transported?” “Transported?” says Dick. “To be sure I would,” says she; “marryin’ you, and my own lawful husband alive! Arrah, Sam Singlestich, dear!--little did I think, when I made taa for ye this evenin’, that I would be bundled off by these villains!” “And who’s Mister Singlestich?” says I. “Who? ye thief of the world! but my lawful husband! Oh, bad luck attend ye, night and day!--ye have the gallows in ye’re face,” says she, lookin’ full at me, “and it’s one comfort, if I live to escape, I’ll hear the Judge tellin’ ye’r fortune at the Ould Baily. Troth, and I’ll go to see ye hanged, too, even if it cost me five shillins for an opposite windy.” “Arrah,” says the postilion, turnin’ sharp round at the word ‘Ould Baily,’ and ‘being hanged,’--“what’s all this about?” “Honest woman,” says I (for Dick seemed stupified) “who the divil are ye?--Ar’n’t ye Miss Figgins?” “Miss?--yer mother!” says she;--“I’m the wife of a dacent tradesman, and the lawful mother of five children an’ I’ll show them again any within a mile of Huggin Lane.” “Oh,” says the postboy, jumpin’ out of the saddle--“by the powers of pewter! we’re all dead men!” and, at one spring, he clears the fence, and cuts over hedge and ditch like a madman. “And,” says I to myself, “maybe I’m goin’ to sit here and be hanged?”--and down I hops too. Dick Macnamara seemed to be of the same opinion, for he was on the road already. We takes the country out of the face, as if we were matched for a hundred--lavin’ the tailor’s wife and the two post-horses--the one to look after the other.