'
All your healths, childhre! Neighbors, all your healths! don't spare
what's before ye. It's long since I tuck a jorum myself an--come, I say,
plase God, we'll often meet ins' way, so we will. Faith, I'll take a sup
from this forrid, with a blessin'. Dhrink, I say, dhrink!"
By the time he had arrived at this patch, he was able to engross no
great portion either of the conversation or attention. Almost every one
present had his songs, his sorrows, his laughter, or his anecdotes, as
well as himself. Every voice was loud; and every tongue busy. Intricate
and entangled was the talk, which, on the present occasion, presented
a union of all the extremes which the lights and shadows of the Irish
character alone could exhibit under such a calamity as that which
brought the friends of the deceased together.
Peter literally fulfilled his promise of taking a jorum in future. He
was now his own master; and as he felt the loss of his wife deeply,
he unhappily had recourse to the bottle, to bury the recollection of a
woman, whose death left a chasm in his heart, which he thought nothing
but the whiskey could fill up.
His transition from a life of perfect sobriety to one of habitual, nay,
of daily intoxication, was immediate. He could not bear to be sober;
and his extraordinary bursts of affliction, even in his cups, were often
calculated to draw tears from the eyes of those who witnessed them.
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