“I had a famous cousin on one of these estates, and I suppose you heard of him?  You didn’t!  What are they teaching you at school at all?  Latin grammar?  Well, well!...  My cousin was a clumsy fellow with only a little of middling kind of brains, but a bit of fight in him.  Yet look at the way he got on, and look at me, shodding little boys like yourself!  I was born under a lucky star but my cousin was born under a lucky landlord—­a ferocious fellow who got into a garret in London and kept roaring across at Ireland for more and more blood.  Every time I thought of that old skin of a man howling in the London garret I said to myself, ’He’ll be the making of my cousin.’  And so, indeed, he was.  Three agents were brought down on my cousin’s estate.  State trials were running like great plays in the courthouse.  Blood was always up.  They had six fife-and-drum bands and one brass band.  They had green and gold banners with harps and streamers, and mottoes in yellow lettering, that took four hardy men to carry on a windy day.  The heads of the Peelers were hardly ever out of their helmets.  The resident magistrate rose one day in the bosom of his family, his eyes closed, to say grace before meals, and from dint of habit he was chanting the Riot Act over the table until his wife flew at him with, ‘How dare you, George!  The mutton is quite all right!’ Little boys no bigger than yourself walking along the roads to school in that splendid estate could jump up on the ditch and make good speeches.

“My cousin’s minute books—­he was secretary of everything—­would stock a book-shop, and were noted for beautiful expressions.  He was the author of ten styles of resolution construction.  An enemy christened him Resolving Kavanagh.  Every time he resolved to stand where he always stood he revolved.  Everybody put up at his house.  He was seen in more torchlight processions than Bryan O’Lynn.  A room in his house was decorated in a beautiful scheme of illuminated addresses with border designs from the Book of Kells.  The homes of the people were full of the stumps of burned-down candles, the remains of great illuminations for my cousin whenever he came out of prison.  I tell you no lie when I say that that clumsy cousin of mine became clever and polished, all through pure practice.  He had the best of tutors.  The skin of a landlord in the London garret, his agents, their understrappers, removable magistrates, judges, Crown solicitors, county inspectors of police, sergeants, constables, secret service men,—­all drove him from fame to fame until in the end they chased him out the only gap that was left open to the like of him—­the English Parliament.  Think of the streak of that man’s career!  And there was I, a man of capacity and brains, born with the golden spoon of talent in my mouth, dead to the world in Gobstown!  I was rotting like a turnip under the best and the most accursed of landlords.  In the end I could not stand it—­no man of spirit could.