[Charles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon Volume 2 (of 2) by Charles Lever]@TWC D-Link bookCharles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon Volume 2 (of 2) CHAPTER XXI 7/23
The order of the viands, too, observed no common routine, each party being happy to get what he could, and satisfied to follow up his pudding with fish, or his tart with a sausage.
Sherry, champagne, London porter, Malaga, and even, I believe, Harvey's sauce were hobnobbed in; while hot punch, in teacups or tin vessels, was unsparingly distributed on all sides.
Achilles himself, they say, got tired of eating, and though he consumed something like a prize ox to his own cheek, he at length had to call for cheese, so that we at last gave in, and having cleared away the broken tumbrels and baggage-carts of our army, cleared for a general action. "Now, lads!" cried the major, "I'm not going to lose your time and mine by speaking; but there are a couple of toasts I must insist upon your drinking with all the honors; and as I like despatch, we'll couple them.
It so happens that our old island boasts of two of the finest fellows that ever wore Russia ducks.
None of your nonsensical geniuses, like poets or painters or anything like that; but downright, straightforward, no-humbug sort of devil-may-care and bad-luck-to-you kind of chaps,--real Irishmen! Now, it's a strange thing that they both had such an antipathy to vermin, they spent their life in hunting them down and destroying them; and whether they met toads at home or Johnny Crapaud abroad, it was all one.
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