quadron square,
They all were there,
To meet the French in the morning."

"Gloriously done, Fred!" cried Hixley. "If I ever get my deserts in this
world, I'll make you Laureate to the Forces, with a hogshead of your own
native whiskey for every victory of the army."

"A devilish good chant," said Merivale, "but the air surpasses anything I
ever heard,--thoroughly Irish, I take it."

"Irish! upon my conscience, I believe you!" shouted O'Shaughnessy, with an
energy of voice and manner that created a hearty laugh on all sides. "It's
few people ever mistook it for a Venetian melody. Hand over the punch,--the
sherry, I mean. When I was in the Clare militia, we always went in to
dinner to 'Tatter Jack Walsh,' a sweet air, and had 'Garryowen' for a
quick-step. Ould M'Manus, when he got the regiment, wanted to change: he
said, they were damned vulgar tunes, and wanted to have 'Rule Britannia,'
or the 'Hundredth Psalm;' but we would not stand it; there would have been
a mutiny in the corps."

"The same fellow, wasn't he, that you told the story of, the other evening,
in Lisbon?" said I.

"The same. Well, what a character he was! As pompous and conceited a little
fellow as ever you met with; and then, he was so bullied by his wife, he
always came down to revenge it on the regiment. She was a fine, showy,
vulgar woman, with a most cherishing affection for all the good things in
this life, except her husband, whom she certainly held in due contempt. 'Ye
little crayture,' she'd say to him with a sneer, 'it ill becomes you
to drink and sing, and be making a man of yourself. If you were like
O'Shaughnessy there, six foot three in his stockings--'Well, well, it looks
like boasting; but no matter. Here's her health, anyway."

"I knew you were tender in that quarter," said Power, "I heard it when
quartered in Limerick."

"May be you heard, too, how I paid off Mac, when he came down on a visit to
that county?"

"Never: let's hear it now."

"Ay, O'Shaughnessy, now's your time; the fire's a good one, the night fine,
and liquor plenty."

"I'm _convanient_," said O'Shaughnessy, as depositing his enormous legs on
each side of the burning fagots, and placing a bottle between his knees he
began his story:--

"It was a cold rainy night in January, in the year '98, I took my place in
the Limerick mail, to go down for a few days to the west country. As the
waiter of the Hibernian came to the door with a lantern, I just