So when they Irish reapers
comes into the vens, our chaps always says, 'Yow goo to Guy Hall, there's
yor brithren a-waitin' for yow,' and that do make um joost mad loike, it
do. I tell ye there's nowt like a wise 'ooman, for vinding out the likes o'
this."
At this hopeful stage of the argument I left them to go to the Magazine
office. As I passed through Covent Garden, a pretty young woman stopped me
under a gas-lamp. I was pushing on when I saw it was Jemmy Downes's Irish
wife, and saw, too, that she did not recognise me. A sudden instinct made
me stop and hear what she had to say.
"Shure, thin, and ye're a tailor, my young man?"
"Yes," I said, nettled a little that my late loathed profession still
betrayed itself in my gait.
"From the counthry?"
I nodded, though I dared not speak a white lie to that effect. I fancied
that, somehow, through her I might hear of poor Kelly and his friend
Porter.
"Ye'll be wanting work, thin?"
"I have no work."
"Och, thin, it's I can show ye the flower o' work, I can. Bedad, there's a
shop I know of where ye'll earn--bedad, if ye're the ninth part of a man,
let alone a handy young fellow like the looks of you--och, ye'll earn
thirty shillings the week, to the very least--an' beautiful lodgings;
och, thin, just come and see 'em--as chape as mother's milk! Gome along,
thin--och, it's the beauty ye are--just the nate figure for a tailor.
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