pint of
beer down its throat: he then drank its health, and finished by
"bottling up the music," absolutely cramming a cork into the trumpet.
Now Andy, having no idea the trumpeter made a sham of the action, made a
vigorous plunge of a goodly cork into the throat of the instrument, and,
in so doing, the cork went further than he intended: he tried to
withdraw it, but his clumsy fingers, instead of extracting, only drove
it in deeper--he became alarmed--and, seizing a fork, strove with its
assistance to remedy the mischief he had done, but the more he poked,
the worse; and, in his fright, he thought the safest thing he could do
was to cram the cork out of sight altogether, and having soon done that,
he returned to the yard, and laid down the trumpet unobserved.

Immediately after, the procession to the town started. O'Grady gave
orders that the party should not be throwing away their powder and
shot, as he called it, in untimely huzzas and premature music. "Wait
till you come to the town, boys," said he, "and then you may smash away
as hard as you can; blow your heads off, and split the sky."

The party of Merryvale was in motion for the place of action about the
same time, and a merrier pack of rascals never was on the march.
Murphy, in accordance with his preconceived notion of a "fine effect,"
had literally "a cart full of fiddlers;" but the fiddlers hadn't it all
to themselves, for there was another cart full of pipers; and, by way
of mockery to the grandeur of Scatterbrain's band, he had four or five
boys with gridirons, which they played upon with pokers, and half a
dozen strapping fellows carrying large iron tea-trays, which they
whopped after the manner of a Chinese gong.

It so happened that the two roads from Merryvale and Neck-or-Nothing
Hall met at an acute angle, at the same end of the town, and it chanced
that the rival candidates and their retinues arrived at this point
about the same time.

"There they are!" said Murphy, who presided in the cart full of fiddlers
like a leader in an orchestra, with a shillelah for his _baton_, which
he flourished over his head as he shouted, "Now give it to them, your
sowls!--rasp and lilt away, boys!--slate the gridirons, Mike!--smaddher
the tay-tray, Tom!"

The uproar of strange sounds that followed, shouting included, may be
easier imagined than described; and O'Grady, answering the war-cry, sung
out to his band--"What are you at, you lazy rascals?--don't you hear