“Just so; he'd make a great Judas!” said Crow, enthusiastically. “It is the miser all over. You know,” added he, “if one took him in the historical way, you 'd get rid of the vulgarity, and make him grander and finer; for, looking at him now, he might be a dog-stealer.” Scanlan gave a low, cautious laugh as he placed a chair beside his own for the artist, and filled out for him a bumper of port. “I was just dying for a glass of this,” said Crow. “I dined with Mr. Barry upstairs; and though he's a fine-hearted old fellow in many respects, he's too abstemious; a pint of sherry for two at dinner, and a pint of port after, that's the allowance. Throw out as many hints as you like, suggest how and what you will, but devil a drop more you'll get.” “And who is he?” asked Scanlan. “I wish you could tell me,” said Crow. “You haven't a notion; nor what he is?” “Not the slightest. I think, indeed, he said he was in the army; but I'm not clear it wasn't a commissary or a surgeon; maybe he was, but he knows a little about everything. Take him on naval matters, and he understands them well; ask him about foreign countries,--egad, he was everywhere. Ireland seems the only place new to him, and it won't be so long; for he goes among the people, and talks to them, and hears all they have to say, with a patience that breaks my heart. Like all strangers, he's astonished with the acuteness he meets with, and never ceases saying, 'Ain't they a wonderful people? Who ever saw their equal for intelligence?'” “Bother!” said Scanlan, contemptuously. “But it is not bother! Maurice; he's right. They are just what he says.” “Arrah! don't be humbugging _me_, Mr. Crow,” said the other. “They 're a set of scheming, plotting vagabonds, that are unmanageable by any one, except a fellow that has the key to them as I have.” “_You_ know them, that's true,” said Crow, half apologetically, for he liked the port, and did not feel he ought to push contradiction too far. “And that's more than your friend Barry does, or ever will,” said Scanlan. “I defy an Englishman--I don't care how shrewd he is--to understand Paddy.” A slight movement on Mr. Merl's part here admonished the speaker to speak lower. “Ay,” continued Maurice, “that fellow there--whoever he is or whatever he is--is no fool! he 's deep enough; and yet there 's not a bare-legged gossoon on the estate I won't back to take him in.” “But Barry's another kind of man entirely. You wouldn't call him cute or cunning; but he's a sensible, well-judging man, that has seen a deal of life.” “And what is it, he says, brings him here?” asked Scanlan. “He never said a word about that yet,” replied Crow, “further than his desire to visit a country he had heard much of, and, if I understand him aright, where some of his ancestors came from; for, you see, at times he's not so easy for one to follow, for he has a kind of a foreign twang in his tongue, and often mumbles to himself in a strange language.”