_Mineog:_ Am I yellow and pale and shrunken?

_Hazel:_ Why would you be?

_Mineog:_ Would you say me to be crampy in the body? Am I staggery
in the legs?

_Hazel:_ I see no such signs.

_Mineog:_ Is it in my hand you see them? Is it lame or is it
freezed-brittle like ice?

_Hazel:_ It is as warm and as good as my own.

_Mineog:_ Let me take a hold of you till you will tell me has it
the feel of a dead man's grip.

_Hazel:_ I know that it has not.

_Mineog:_ Is it shaking like a bunch of timber shavings?

_Hazel:_ Not at all, not at all.

_Mineog:_ It should be my hearing that is failing from me, or that
I am crippled and have lost my walk.

_Hazel:_ You are roaring and bawling without sense.

_Mineog:_ Let the _Champion_ go to flitters before I will die to
please it! I will not give in to it driving me out of the world
before my hour is spent! It would hardly ask that of a man would be
of no use and no account, or even of a beast of any consequence.

_Hazel:_ Who is asking you to die?

_Mineog:_ Giving no time hardly for the priest to overtake me and
to give me the rites of the Church!

_Hazel:_ I tell you there is no danger of you giving up at all!
Every person knows there must some sickness come before death. Some
take it from a neighbour and it is put on others by God.

_Mineog:_ Even so, it's hard say.

_Hazel:_ You have not a ha'p'orth on you. No complaint in the
world wide.

_Mineog:_ That's nothing! Sickness comes upon some as sudden as to
clap their hands.

_Hazel:_ What are you talking about? You are thinking us to be in
the days of the cholera yet!

_Mineog:_ There are yet other diseases besides that.

_Hazel:_ You put the measles over you and we going the road to
school.

_Mineog:_ There is more than measles has power bring a man down.

_Hazel:_ You had the chin-cough passed and you rising. We were cut
at the one time for the pock.

_Mineog:_ A disease to be allotted to you it would find you out,
and you maybe up twenty mile in the air!

_Hazel:_ Ah, what disease could have you swept in the course of
the next two days?

_Mineog:_ That is what I'm after saying--unless you might have
murder in your mind?

_Hazel:_ Ah, what murder!

_Mineog:_ What way are you thinking to do away with me? To shoot
me with the trigger of a gun and to give me shortening of life?

_Hazel:_ The trigger of a gun! God bless it, I never fingered such
a thing in the length of my life!

_Mineo