will tell me."

"I'm Christ," replied Rody; "and, upon my word, if you don't get out o'
this, I'll work a miracle on you."

"Why," asked the stranger, "what will you do?"

"Troth, I'll turn you into a blackin' brush, and polish my shoes wid
you. You were at Barney's death, too."

The poor man had gone deranged, it seemed, by the violent death of his
only child--a son.

"There's another man," said the conductor; "that little fellow with the
angry face. He is a shoemaker, who went mad on the score of humanity. He
took a strong feeling of resentment against all who had flat feet, and
refused to make shoes for them."

"How was that?" inquired the stranger.

"Why, sir," said the other, smiling, "he said that they murdered the
clocks (beetles), and he looked upon every man with flat feet as an
inhuman villain, who deserves, he says, to have his feet chopped
off, and to be compelled to dance a hornpipe three times a day on his
stumps."

"Who is that broad-shouldered man," asked the stranger, "dressed in
rusty black, with the red head?"

"He went mad," replied the conductor, "on a principle of religious
charity. He is a priest from the county of Wexford, who had been called
in to baptize the child of a Protestant mother, which, having done, he
seized a tub, and placing it on the child's neck, killed it; exclaiming,
'I am now sure of having sent one soul to heaven.'"

"You are not without poets here, of course?" said the stranger.

"We have, unfortunately," replied the other, "more individuals of
that class than we can well manage. They ought to have an asylum
for themselves. There's a fellow, now, he in the tattered jacket and
nightcap, who has written a heroic poem, of eighty-six thousand verses,
which he entitles 'Balaam's Ass, or the Great Unsaddled.' Shall I call
him over?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake, no," replied the stranger; "keep me from the
poets."

"There is one of the other species," replied the gentleman, "the thin,
red-eyed fellow, who grinds his teeth. He fancies himself a wit and a
satirist, and is the author of an unpublished poem, called 'The Smoking
Dunghill, or Parnassus in a Fume.' He published several things, which
were justly attacked on account of their dulness, and he is now in an
awful fury against all the poets of the day, to every one of whom he has
given an appropriate position on the sublime pedestal, which he has, as
it were, with his own hands, erected for them. He certainly ought t