New Comedies Part 3

_Taig:_ Striving to blacken my face again at the time I had it washed pure white. You surely have a heart of marble.

_Darby:_ What way at all can you be putting such a rascally say out of your mouth? I'll take no more talk from you, I to be twenty-two degrees lower than the Hottentots!

_Taig:_ If you are my full cousin Dermot Melody I'll make you quit talking of soot!

_Darby:_ I'll take no more talk from yourself!

_Taig:_ Have a care now!

_Darby:_ Have a care yourself!

_(Each gives the other a push. They stumble and fall, sitting facing one another. Darby's hat falls off.)_

_Taig:_ Is it _you_ it is?

_Darby:_ Who else would it be?

_Taig:_ What call had you letting on to be Dermot Melody?

_Darby:_ What letting on? Dermot is my full name, but Darby is the name I am called.

_Taig:_ Are you a man owning riches and shops and merchandise?

_Darby:_ I am not, or anything of the sort.

_Taig:_ Have you teems of money in the bank?

_Darby:_ If I had would I be sitting on this floor?

_Taig:_ You thief you!

_Darby:_ Thief yourself! Turn around now till I will measure your features and your face. _Yourself_ is it! Is it personating my cousin Timothy you are?

_Taig:_ I am personating no one but myself.

_Darby:_ You letting on to be an estated magistrate and my own cousin and such a great generation of a man. And you not owning so much as a rood of ridges!

_Taig:_ Covering yourself with choice clothing for to deceive me and to lead me astray!

_Darby:_ Putting on your head a fine glossy hat and I thinking you to have come with the spring-tide, the way you had luck through your life!

_Taig:_ Letting on to be Dermot Melody! You that are but the cull and the weakling of a race! It is a queer game you played on me and a crooked game. I never would have brought my legs so far to meet with the sooty likes of you!

_Darby:_ Letting on to be my poor Timothy O'Harragha!

_Taig:_ I never was called but Taig. Timothy was a sort of a Holy day name.

_Darby:_ Where now are our two cousins? Or is it that the both of us are cracked?

_Taig:_ It is, or our mothers before us.

_Darby:_ My mother was a McGarrity woman from Loughrea. It is Mary was her Christened name.

_Taig:_ So was my own mother of the McGarritys. It is sisters they were sure enough.

_Darby:_ That makes us out to be full cousins in the heel.

_Taig:_ You no better than myself! And the prayers I used to be saying for you, and you but a sketch and an excuse of a man!

_Darby:_ Ah, I am thinking people put more in their prayers than was ever put in them by G.o.d.

_Taig:_ Our mothers picturing us to one another as if we were the best in the world.

_Darby:_ Lies I suppose they were drawing down, for to startle us into good behaviour.

_Taig:_ Wouldn't you say now mothers to be a terror?

_Darby:_ And we nothing at all after but two chimney sweepers and two harmless drifty lads.

_Taig:_ Where is the great quality dinner yourself was to give me, having seven sorts of dressed meat? Pullets and bacon I was looking for, and to fall on an easy life.

_Darby:_ Gone like the clouds of the winter's fog. We rose out of it the same as we went in.

_Taig:_ We have nothing to do but to starve with the hunger, and you being as bare as myself.

_Darby:_ We are in a bad s.h.i.+ft surely. We must perish with the want of support. It is one of the tricks of the world does be played upon the children of Adam.

_Taig:_ All we have to do is to crawl to the poorhouse gate. Or to go dig a pit in the graveyard, as it is short till we'll be stretched there with the want of food.

_Darby:_ Food is it? There is nothing at this time against me eating my bit of a herring.

_(Seizes it and takes a bite.)_

_Taig:_ Give me a divide of it.

_Darby:_ Give me a drop of your own porter so, is in the bottle.

There need be no dread on you now, of you being no match for your grand man.

_Taig:_ That is so. _(Drinks.)_ I'll strive no more to fit myself for high quality relations. I am free from patterns of high up cousins from this out. I'll be a pattern to myself.

_Darby:_ I am well content being free of you, the way you were pictured to be. I declare to my goodness, the name of you put terror on me through the whole of my lifetime, and your image to be clogging and checking me on every side.

_Taig:_ To be thinking of you being in the world was a holy terror to myself. I give you my word you came through my sleep the same as a scarecrow or a dragon.

_Darby:_ It is great things I will be doing from this out, we two having nothing to cast up against one another. To be quit of Timothy the bogie and to get Taig for a comrade, I'm as proud as the Crown of France!

_Taig:_ I'm in dread of neither b.u.mble or bagman or bugaboo! I will regulate things from myself from this out.

_Darby:_ There to be fineness of living in the world, why wouldn't I make it out for myself?