we flout reason, night is out season at half-past ten.

This introductory ode to Freedom was his throwing off of steam, the
foretaste of what he contained. He rejoined his cousins, chirping
variations on it, and attired in a green silken suit of airy Ottoman
volume, full of incitement to the legs and arms to swing and set him up
for a Sultan. 'Now Phil, now Pat,' he cried, after tenderly pulling the
door to and making sure it was shut, 'any tale you've a mind
for--infamous and audacious! You're licensed by the gods up here, and may
laugh at them too, and their mothers and grandmothers, if the fit seizes
ye, and the heartier it is the greater the exemption. We're pots that
knock the lid and must pour out or boil over and destroy the furniture.
My praties are ready for peelin', if ever they were in this world! Chuck
wigs from sconces, and off with your buckram. Decency's a dirty petticoat
in the Garden of Innocence. Naked we stand, boys! we're not afraid of
nature. You're in the annexe of Erin, Pat, and devil a constable at the
keyhole; no rats; I'll say that for the Government, though it's a
despotism with an iron bridle on the tongue outside to a foot of the
door. Arctic to freeze the boldest bud of liberty! I'd like a French
chanson from ye, Pat, to put us in tune, with a right revolutionary
hurling chorus, that pitches Kings' heads into the basket like autumn
apples. Or one of your hymns in Gaelic sung ferociously to sound as
horrid to the Saxon, the wretch. His reign 's not for ever; he can't
enter here. You're in the stronghold defying him. And now cigars, boys,
pipes; there are the boxes, there are the bowls. I can't smoke till I
have done steaming. I'll sit awhile silently for the operation.
Christendom hasn't such a man as your cousin Con for feeling himself a
pig-possessed all the blessed day, acting the part of somebody else, till
it takes me a quarter of an hour of my enfranchisement and restoration of
my natural man to know myself again. For the moment, I'm froth, scum,
horrid boiling hissing dew of the agony of transformation; I am; I'm that
pig disgorging the spirit of wickedness from his poor stomach.'

The captain drooped to represent the state of the self-relieving victim
of the evil one; but fearful lest either of his cousins should usurp the
chair and thwart his chance of delivering himself, he rattled away
sympathetically with his posture in melancholy: 'Ay, we're poor
creatures; pigs and prophets, pr