Then Mr. Wag walked up the hill to Balladhoo, and, "Jemmy," said he, "it's mortal strange the way a man of your common-sense can't see that you'd wallop that squeaking ould Tommy-Bill-beg in a jiffy if you'd only consent to sing a ballad along with him. Do it at the Oiel Verree to-night, Jemmy, and bless me! that's the when they'll be seeing what a weak, ould, cracked–pot of a voice is at the craythur."
The gardener of Balladhoo fell an easier prey to the plot than the harbor-master, and a carol was selected. It was to be the ancient carol on the bad women mentioned in the Bible as having (from Eve downward) brought evil on mankind. This was accounted an appropriate ditty for these notable illustrations of bachelordom.
Now, Tommy-Bill-beg always kept his carols where Danny saw them—pinned against the walls of his cottage. The "Bad Women" was the carol which was pinned above the mantelpiece. It resembled all the others in being worn, crumpled, and dirty; but Tommy knew it by its locality, and could distinguish every other by its position.
Young Mr. Wag had somehow got what he called a "skute" into this literary mystery; so, after arranging with Jemmy Quark, he watched Tommy-Bill-beg out of his house, crept into it unobserved took down the carol pinned above the mantel–piece, and fixed up another in place of it from a different part of the room. The substituted carol happened, oddly enough, to be a second copy of the same carol on "Bad Women," with this radical difference: that the one taken down was the
