you!"

"Strap me," whimpered the little Doctor, plucking feverishly at the
buttons of his coat, rolling his eyes wildly, not knowing at all what
he did. "The man's mad! The man's mad!"

"No," said I, "my blood is cold, very cold."

The little Doctor looked at me with the light of a desperate
inspiration in his eye. "If your blood is cold, sir," said he, "I can
recommend a gill of port wine."

I needs must laugh. "Good," I cried, "and you will join me."

CHAPTER XXI

I don't know if it was the gill of comforting port, but at any rate I
was soon enough convinced that there was no reason for speaking
harshly to Doctor Chord. It served no purpose; it accomplished
nothing. The little old villain was really as innocent as a lamb. He
had no dream of wronging people. His prattle was the prattle of an
unsophisticated maiden lady. He did not know what he was talking.
These direful intelligences ran as easily off his tongue as water runs
off the falling wheel. When I had indirectly informed him that he was
more or less of a dangerous scandal-monger, he had cried: "The man is
mad!" Yes; he was an innocent old thing.

But then it is the innocent old scandal-mongers, poor placid-minded
well-protected hens, who are often the most harmful. The vicious
gabblers defeat themselves very often. I remember my father once going
to a fair and kissing some girls there. He kissed them all turn by
turn, as was his right and his duty, and then he returned to a girl
near the head of the list and kissed her five times more because she
was the prettiest girl in all Ireland, and there is no shame to him
there. However, there was a great hullabaloo. The girls who had been
kissed only once led a regular crusade against the character of this
other girl, and before long she had a bad name, and the odious sly
lads with no hair on their throats winked as she passed them, and
numerous mothers thanked God that their daughters were not fancied by
the lord of that region. In time these tales came to the ears of my
father, and he called some of his head men to meet him in the
dining-room.

"I'll have no trifling," said he. "The girl is a good girl for all I
know, and I have never seen her before or since. If I can trace a bad
word to any man's mouth, I'll flog him till he can't move. 'Tis a
shame taking away the girl's name for a few kisses by the squire at a
fair with everybody looking on and laughing. What do you blackguards
mean?"

Every