'Good natured dog that--ha! ha! You'll find he'll oust Nutter at last, and get the agency; that's what he's driving at--always undermining somebody.' Doctor Sturk and Lord Castlemallard were talking apart on the high ground, and the artillery surgeon was pointing with his cane at distant objects.

'I'll lay you fifty he's picking holes in Nutter's management this moment.' I'm afraid there was some truth in the theory, and Toole--though he did not remember to mention it--had an instinctive notion that Sturk had an eye upon the civil practice of the neighbourhood, and was meditating a retirement from the army, and a serious invasion of his domain.
Sturk and Toole, behind backs, did not spare one another.

Toole called Sturk a 'horse doctor,' and 'the smuggler'-- in reference to some affair about French brandy, never made quite clear to me, but in which, I believe, Sturk was really not to blame; and Sturk called him 'that drunken little apothecary'-- for Toole had a boy who compounded, under the rose, his draughts, pills, and powders in the back parlour--and sometimes, 'that smutty little ballad singer,' or 'that whiskeyfied dog-fancier, Toole.' There was no actual quarrel, however; they met freely--told one another the news--their mutual disagreeabilities were administered guardedly--and, on the whole, they hated one another in a neighbourly way.
Fat, short, radiant, General Chattesworth--in full, artillery uniform--was there, smiling, and making little speeches to the ladies, and bowing stiffly from his hips upward--his great cue playing all the time up and down his back, and sometimes so near the ground when he stood erect and threw back his head, that Toole, seeing Juno eyeing the appendage rather viciously, thought it prudent to cut her speculations short with a smart kick.
His sister Rebecca--tall, erect, with grand lace, in a splendid stiff brocade, and with a fine fan--was certainly five-and-fifty, but still wonderfully fresh, and sometimes had quite a pretty little pink colour--perfectly genuine--in her cheeks; command sat in her eye and energy on her lip--but though it was imperious and restless, there was something provokingly likeable and even pleasant in her face.

Her niece, Gertrude, the general's daughter, was also tall, graceful--and, I am told, perfectly handsome.
'Be the powers, she's mighty handsome!' observed 'Lieutenant Fireworker' O'Flaherty, who, being a little stupid, did not remember that such a remark was not likely to pleasure the charming Magnolia Macnamara, to whom he had transferred the adoration of a passionate, but somewhat battered heart.
'They must not see with my eyes that think so,' said Mag, with a disdainful toss of her head.
'They say she's not twenty, but I'll wager a pipe of claret she's something to the back of it,' said O'Flaherty, mending his hand.
'Why, bless your innocence, she'll never see five-and-twenty, and a bit to spare,' sneered Miss Mag, who might more truly have told that tale of herself.

'Who's that pretty young man my Lord Castlemallard is introducing to her and old Chattesworth ?' The commendation was a shot at poor O'Flaherty.
'Hey--so, my Lord knows him!' says Toole, very much interested.