“The talk of ye,” says Tobin, blowing through his moustache and pounding the table with his fist, “is an eyesore to me patience. There was good luck promised out of the crook of your nose, but ye bear fruit like the bang of a drum. Ye resemble, with your noise of books, the wind blowing through a crack. Sure, now, I would be thinking the palm of me hand lied but for the coming true of the nigger man and the blonde lady and———”
“Whist!” says the long man; “would ye be led astray by physiognomy? Me nose will do what it can within bounds. Let us have these glasses filled again, for ’tis good to keep idiosyncrasies well moistened, they being subject to deterioration in a dry moral atmosphere.”
So, the man of literature makes good, to my notion, for he pays, cheerful, for everything, the capital of me and Tobin being exhausted by prediction. But Tobin is sore, and drinks quiet, with the red showing in his eye.
By and by we moved out, for ’twas eleven o’clock, and stands a bit upon the sidewalk. And then the man says he must be going home, and invites me and Tobin to walk that way. We arrives on a side street two blocks away where there is a stretch of brick houses with high stoops and iron fences. The man
[14]
