he best of
everything but the poor little Spider was lookin' on, very near
perishin' wid hunger an' fright. Well, at the long and the last, when
he thought there was nobody lookin', he crept down the wall an'
folleyed wan o' the sarvants out o' the room, an' by good luck, the
hall door was open, so the poor fellow made off wid himself as fast as
he could. Down the road wid him till he come to where the Gout was
sittin' waitin' for him at the crass roads. 'Is that yourself?' says
the Spider. 'How did you get on?' says he. 'Och,' says the poor
Gout"--and here Pat assumed a tone of extreme weakness and
exhaustion--"'it's near killed I am altogether; I never put in such a
time in me life.' 'Well, for that matther,' says the Spider, 'I might
say the same; but what happened to ye at all? Tell me all about it in
the name of goodness,' says he.

"'Well,' says the Gout, 'I went off down the boreen the same as ye
told me, an' I come to the little cabin beyant; the door was open an'
in I walked, but o--o--oh! Wh--o--o--oh!' (Pat indulged in a prolonged
shiver, while Roseen chuckled and clapped her hands.) 'The cowld of
that place was near bein' the death o' me! Sure the wind blew into
it,' says he, 'an' the rain was comin' through the roof, an' there
wasn't as much fire on the hearth as 'ud warm a fly itself. Well, the
poor man come in afther a bit,' says the Gout, 'an' I slipped in
through a crack in his owld wore-out brogue, an' into his toe. "Och,
Mary," says the poor man to his wife, "I have a terrible bad pain in
me toe! What'll I do in the world?" says he; "I'll never be able to
stir a fut to-morrow." "Whisht, sure it's maybe a bit of a cramp ye've
got. Wait a bit," she says, "an' I'll fetch ye a sup o' the wather I'm
afther bilin' the pitaties in, maybe that'll do ye good," she says.
'Well,' says the Gout, 'if the fellow didn't go an' put his fut, _an'
me in it_, into an owld rusty bucket full of pitaty-wather! I thought
he'd have destroyed me altogether. An' such a night as I passed, wid
scarcely a blanket at all on the bed! An' nothin' 'ud sarve the man
but to get up before light, an' go thrampin' off through the mud an'
rain till I was nearly perished. There he was draggin' me up an' down
at the tail of a plough, wid the wet soakin' in through the holes in
his brogues, till I couldn't stand it any more, an' I come away wid
meself, an' I've been waitin' for ye this two hours.' 'Ho then,
indeed,' says the Spider, 'I'd hav