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Margaret and Larry’s wedding tour did not extend beyond Mrs. Finnigan’s establishment, where they took two or three rooms and set up housekeeping in a humble way. Margaret, who was a tidy housewife, kept the floor of her apartments as white as your hand, the tin plates on the dresser as bright as your lady-love’s eyes, and the cooking-stove as neat as the machinery on a Sound steamer. When she was not rubbing the stove with lamp-black she was cooking upon it some savory dish to tempt the palate of her marine monster. Naturally of a hopeful temperament, she went about her work singing softly to herself at times, and would have been very happy that first week if Mr. O’Rourke had known a sober moment. But Mr. O’Rourke showed an exasperating disposition to keep up festivities. At the end of ten days, however, he toned down, and at Margaret’s suggestion that he had better be looking about for some employment he rigged up a fishing-pole, and set out with an injured air for the wharf at the foot of the street, where he fished for the rest of the day. To sit for hours blinking in the sun, waiting for a cunner to come along and take his hook, was as exhaustive a kind of labor as he cared to engage in. Though Mr. O’Rourke had recently returned from a long cruise, he had not a cent to show. During his first three days ashore he had dissipated his three years’ pay. The housekeeping expenses began eating a hole in Margaret’s little fund, the existence of which was no sooner known to Mr. O’Rourke than he stood up his fishing-rod in one corner of the room, and thenceforth it caught nothing but cobwebs.

“Divil a sthroke o’ work I ‘ll do,” said Mr. O’Rourke, “whin we can live at aise on our earnin’s. Who ‘d be afther frettin’ hisself, wid money in the bank? How much is it, Peggy darlint?”

And divil a stroke more of work did he do. He lounged down on the wharves, and, with his short clay pipe stuck between his lips and his hands in his pockets, stared off at the sail-boats on the river. He sat on the door-step of the Finnigan domicile, and plentifully chaffed the passers-by. Now and then, when he could wheedle some fractional currency out of Margaret, he spent it like a crown-prince at The Wee Drop around the corner. With that fine magnetism which draws together birds of a feather, he shortly drew about him all the ne’er-do-weels of Rivermouth.

It was really wonderful what an unsuspected lot of them there was. From all the frowzy purlieus of the town they crept forth into the sunlight to array themselves under the banner of the prince of scallawags. It was edifying of a summer afternoon to see a dozen of them sitting in a row, like turtles, on the string-piece of Jedediah Rand’s wharf, with their twenty-four feet dangling over the water, assisting Mr. O’Rourke in contemplating the islands in the harbor, and upholding the scenery, as it were.

The rascal had one accomplishment, he had a heavenly voice–quite in the rough, to be sure–and he played, on the violin like an angel. He did not know one note from another, but he played in a sweet natural way, just as Orpheus must have played, by ear. The drunker he was the more pathos and humor he wrung from the old violin, his sole piece of personal property. He had a singular fancy for getting up at two or three o’clock in the morning, and playing by an open casement, to the distraction of all the dogs in the immediate neighborhood and innumerable dogs in the distance.

Unfortunately, Mr. O’Rourke’s freaks were not always of so innocent a complexion. On one or two occasions, through an excess of animal and other spirits, he took to breaking windows in the town. Among his nocturnal feats he accomplished the demolition of the glass in the door of The Wee Drop. Now, breaking windows in Rivermouth is an amusement not wholly disconnected with an interior view of the police-station (bridewell is the local term); so it happened that Mr. O’Rourke woke up one fine morning and found himself snug and tight in one of the cells in the rear of the Brick Market. His plea that the bull’s-eye in the glass door of The Wee Drop winked at him in an insult-in’ manner as he was passing by did not prevent Justice Hackett from fining the delinquent ten dollars and costs, which made sad havoc with the poor wife’s bank account. So Margaret’s married life wore on, and all went merry as a funeral knell.