into the soir�e, boisterously trolling, like a veritable son of a seacook:

The biscuits was as hard as brass

And the beef as salt as Lot’s wife’s arse.

O, Johnny Lever!

Johnny Lever, O!

After which effusion the redoubtable specimen duly arrived on the scene and regaining his seat he sank rather than sat heavily on the form provided. Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent the natural resources of Ireland or something of that sort which he described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on the face of God’s earth, far and away superior to England, with coal