.

Now the maid had never heard the word dowager in her life, but thought
she would make a shot for it, so when his reverence asked if Mrs.
MacCarthy was at home, she blurted out:--

'No, sir, but the badger is.'

And to her dying day the relic of deceased MacCarthy went by the name of
'the badger.'

Now it is really time I related how my own beauty was spoilt, by
breaking my nose in 1858.

I was racing the present Knight of Kerry and a young gunner named
Hickson--no relation--on the Strand, when the horse of the latter
collided with my own, and they both fell at the same time. He was a
loose rider, and being shot off some distance from his animal picked
himself up unhurt. I had always a tight grip, so I got entangled in the
saddle which twisted round, and my mare almost literally tore off my
face with her hind hoof.

I walked back a quarter of a mile, trying to hold my face on to my head
with my hand; and in a month's time I was able to get about again, which
the doctor said was one of the quickest cases of healing he had ever
known.

But I was absolutely unrecognised by my acquaintances when I reappeared,
and Mr. Dillon the R.M. actually took me for a walk in Tralee to see the
town, thinking I was a stranger, a situation the fun of which I heartily
appreciated.

Before that infernal gallop I had a hooked nose like the Duke of
Wellington; and it's lucky I got married when I did, for no one would
have had me afterwards, though my own wife always says 'for shame' if I
make the remark in her presence, God bless her.

When I went to the Abbey of St. Denis, near Paris, I told the verger I
was very anxious to see the likeness of the saint who had walked for six
miles with his head in his hand, because I was the nearest living
counterpart, having walked a quarter of a mile with my face in mine.

Hickson was universally congratulated on his lucky escape. He went out
to India and was dead in eighteen months, and here am I at eighty with
half my face and some of my health still in spite of the attentive care
of my family and the doctor.

My present doctor is a capital fellow, and when he comes to see me he
laughs so much at my stories that I always think he ought to take me
half price. Instead of that he regards me as an animated laboratory for
his interesting chemical experiments; but I had the best of him last
time I was laid up, for I made him take a dose of the filthy compound he
had ordered for me the previou