more; but he wouldn't; whereon, and to defend myself, I flung a
slate at him, and knocked down a Scotch usher with a leaden
inkstand. All the lads huzza'd at this, and some or the servants
wanted to stop me; but taking out a large clasp-knife that my cousin
Nora had given me, I swore I would plunge it into the waistcoat of
the first man who dared to balk me, and faith they let me pass on. I
slept that night twenty miles off Ballywhacket, at the house of a
cottier, who gave me potatoes and milk, and to whom I gave a hundred
guineas after, when I came to visit Ireland in my days of greatness.
I wish I had the money now. But what's the use of regret? I have had
many a harder bed than that I shall sleep on to-night, and many a
scantier meal than honest Phil Murphy gave me on the evening I ran
away from school. So six weeks' was all the schooling I ever got.
And I say this to let parents know the value of it; for though I
have met more learned book-worms in the world, especially a great
hulking, clumsy, blear-eyed old doctor, whom they called Johnson,
and who lived in a court off Fleet Street, in London, yet I pretty
soon silenced him in an argument (at 'Button's Coffeehouse'); and in
that, and in poetry, and what I call natural philosophy, or the
science of life, and in riding, music, leaping, the small-sword, the
knowledge of a horse, or a main of cocks, and the manners of an
accomplished gentleman and a man of fashion, I may say for myself
that Redmond Barry has seldom found his equal. 'Sir,' said I to Mr.
Johnson, on the occasion I allude to--he was accompanied by a Mr.
Buswell of Scotland, and I was presented to the club by a Mr.
Goldsmith, a countryman of my own--'Sir,' said I, in reply to the
schoolmaster's great thundering quotation in Greek, 'you fancy you
know a great deal more than me, because you quote your Aristotle and
your Pluto; but can you tell me which horse will win at Epsom Downs
next week?--Can you run six miles without breathing?--Can you shoot