"what I want to know is what sort is this young man that Pappy's
bringing in on top of us? In God's name, why couldn't he be let go
home to his own?"

"'Young man' is it!" retorted Tishy; "he's nothing but a boy at
school, and a cross boy too! Such beating of his pony as he had when
he wouldn't jump for him! Didn't I try and make poor Zoé go before
him, and th' eye he cast at her! I thought he'd beat me, too!"

"Oh, and is a boy all he is then?" said Mrs. Mangan, with relief in
her voice: "you'd think by the work your father had 'twas the Lord
Leftenant was in it! Run away now, Tishy, like a good girl, and get
those clothes off you, and help Hannah with Barty's room. Boy or man
or whatever he is, he must have a bed under him!"

It was a very deplorable boy who presently arrived at No. 6, The Mall,
Cluhir, and was practically lifted off the car by the Big Doctor.
Francis Aloysius Mangan had many aspects of character of an
undesirable kind, but they were linked with one virtue, the Irish
gift, of a good-natured heart. With his enormous thick hands, that
made Larry think of a tiger's paws, he undressed the boy as cleverly
and gently as he had set the broken bones of his wrist. Mrs. Mangan
and Hannah had not failed; the soup and the jars were, as the latter
authority had pronounced, "as hot as love," similarly passioned was
the ardour of the whisky-punch, with which the proceedings had opened.
Combined with a subsequent sleeping-draught, it conferred the boon of
sleep, and for some hours, at all events, Larry forgot his
recently-acquired knowledge of what pain was. But not for many hours.
In the long darkness of the winter morning he lay with a fast mounting
temperature, while he made the discovery, common to all in his case,