them behind me that will put such a half ounce pill into
your guts as will make you turn up the whites of your eyes like a duck
in thundher. You'll hang me for robbery, you ould sinner! But what is
one half the world doin' but robbin' the other half? and what is the
other half doin' but robbin' them? As for Sir Robert Whitecraft, if he
desaved me by lies and falsehoods, as I'm afraid he did, all I say is,
that if I had him here for one minute I'd show him a trick he'd never
tell to mortal. Now go on, bigwig."

Notwithstanding the solemnity of the position in which this obdurate
ruffian was placed, the judge found it nearly impossible to silence the
laughter of the audience and preserve order in the court. At length he
succeeded, and continued his brief address to the Rapparee:

"Hardened and impenitent reprobate, in the course of my judicial duties,
onerous and often painful as they are and have been, I must say that,
although it has fallen to my lot to pronounce the awful sentence of
death upon many an unfeeling felon, I am bound to say that a public
malefactor so utterly devoid of all the feelings which belong to man,
and so strongly impregnated with those of the savage animal as you
are, has never stood in a dock before me, nor probably before any other
judge, living or dead. Would it be a waste of language to enforce upon
you the necessity of repentance? I fear it would; but it matters not;
the guilt of impenitence be on your own head, still I must do my duty;
try, then, and think of death, and a far more awful judgment than mine.
Think of the necessity you have for; supplicating mercy at the throne of
your Redeemer, who himself died for you, and for all of us, between two
thieves."

"That has nothing to do with my case; I never was a thief; I robbed like
an honest man on the king's highways; but as for thievin', why, you ould
sinner, I never stole a farthing's worth in my life. Don't, then, pitch
such beggarly comparisons into my teeth. I never did what you and your
class often did; I never robbed the poor in the name of the blessed laws
of the land; I never oppressed the widow or the orphan; and for all that
I took from those that did oppress them, the divil a grain of sorrow
or repentance I feel for it, nor ever will feel for it. Oh! mother of
Moses! if I had a glass of whiskey!"

The judge was obliged to enforce silence a second time; for, to-tell the
truth, there was something so ludicrously impenitent in t