The Argosy — page 139: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THe ARGORY. The Knight of the Trowel. ae tossificated and gone to ruination, with a pain under the spoon of her breast.” Moreover, she had a cough and a wheezle, and these latter symptoms she stated with profuse illustrations in a series of short, deep barks. In these the smoke compelled us to join, as it also compelled us to make frequent and liberal use of our cambric; and poor Margaret, never discerning the just source of our tears, nor questioning but they flowed for her, and the coughs, and the wheezles, and the pain beneath that extraordinary instrument unknown to medical science—viz., the “spoon of her breast,” called down a thousand blessings on our sympa- thetic heart, and our eyes, that had the love-light (not the smoke) in them. In the private opinion of Robin, Margaret’s mental calibre was none of the best; and in the private opinion of Margaret, Robin was little else than a fool ; and in the public opinion of their neighbours their private Opinions were considered correct. Margaret was indeed a very stupid old woman ; and there was a brightness in Robin’s eyes sometimes, and a grotesqueness in his speech and behaviour, which almost amounted to insanity. His ideas on the subject of man’s supremacy would have nearly equalled a Turk’s. He evidently never questioned but that Margaret and he were one, and that he was that one. To say the truth, he had but little difficulty in maintaining his supremacy over Margaret, for she was, as he was wont to describe her, with his usual inaccuracy of Scriptural quotations, “a woman living in a state like to our first pa- rents, of neither good nor evil.” Once, when she showed strong symp- toms of temper and disobedience, he intimated to her, with cunning irony, that she was come of ancient descent, her pedigree dating back in direct line as far as that archangel who was cast out of heaven long ago for certain disobedient and presumptuous reasons. On state occasions Robin was wont to lend extra dignity and solemnity to his language, by clothing it in a kind of scriptural phraseology ; he further imparted weight and importance to his words by uttering them in a solemn sepulchral voice. These oral peculiarities, accompanied by huge grimaces and gestures, and a countenance grave as a solemn rook’s, and as rarely moved to laughter, invested him with an air of mystery and peculiarity altogether indescribable to any save those who knew him. Robin, as he himself would express it, was “nayther a say-farin man nor a way-farin man.” All his days had been spent in the same quiet district, his hands and eyes stuck in stone-walls and mortar, building up broken-down walls and putting up new ones, amongst the people who knew him from a boy—and more was the pity, . in his opinion, and irreparable loss to society; for his real vocation, he believed, would have led him to the building up of the broken-down walls of Jerusalem. By this he meant not the veritable Jerusalem, nor the figurative gathering and cementing of the Jews of other lands, but simply preaching to the poor benighted Irish at home, in the south and comicaooks GO) mn