y squeezing her hand,
"you're a first-rate divinity--a tip-top goddess--divil a thing else.
Miss Joolia, may I presoome for to have the plisure and polite gallantry
to help you off the car; 'pon honor it'll be quite grateful and
prejudicial to my feelings--it will, I assoore you!"
"Bless me, whose is that wedding party, Mr. English?" asked Miss Julia,
pointing to the opposite direction of the road.
English instantly turned round to observe, when, by a simultaneous act,
both sisters stepped nimbly from the car. Miss Julia, as if offended,
but at the same time with a comic gravity of expression, exclaimed--
"Oh, fie! Mr. English, is that your boasted gallantry? I'm afraid your
eight years' residence in England, however it may have improved
the elegance of your language and accent, hasn't much improved your
politeness!"
So saying, she and her sister tripped off to the chapel, which they
immediately entered. Much about the same time their brothers arrived,
mounted, certainly, upon a pair of magnificent hunters, and having
handed them over to two lads to be walked about until the conclusion of
Mass, they also entered the chapel, for the priest was not now more than
three or four hundred yards; distant.
The jest practised so successfully upon our friend the Buck occasioned
a general laugh at his expense, a circumstance which filled, him
with serious mortification, if not with actual resentment, for it so
happened, that one of his great foibles was such a morbid sensibility to
ridicule as was absolutely ludicrous.
"Bedad, Mr. English, you wor fairly done there; in spite o' the tall
English, you're no match for the ladies. Miss Julia fairly gev' you the
bag to hould."
The Buck's eye glittered with bitterness.
"Miss Julia, do you say?" he replied; "why, my good friend, the girl was
christened Judy--plain Judy; but now that they've got into high-flown
life, you persave, nothing will sarve them but to ape their betthers.
However, never mind, I'll see the day yet, and that before long, when
saucy Judy won't refuse my assistance. Time about's fair play, you
know."
It may be observed here, that Buck English happened to forget himself,
which he almost always did whenever he became in earnest: he also forgot
his polite language and peculiar elegance of pronunciation. To a vain
and weak mind there is nothing more cutting than the consciousness of
looking mortified in the eyes of others, and under these circumstances
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