’It is such a long time since I laid by the sash and the sword, that I have forgotten my drill.’

‘But you have never forgotten the charge,’ observed the chairman, who had a long bill from Murphy in his pocket at the time.

On another occasion, a lady spoke to James about subscribing to the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Killarney.

‘For my part,’ she observed, ’it’s little I can do in my lifetime, but I have left all my money for the good of my soul.’

‘I believe, ma’am,’ says James, ’you were an original shareholder in the Provincial Bank.  The shares are now quoted at eighty and they pay six per cent.  That is very much like twenty-one per cent. on the original capital.’

‘I am not a clever man like you at making these calculations,’ replies the lady; ‘I have higher and holier things to think about.’

‘Don’t say that again to me, ma’am,’ says he.  ’I put my money into farms, and I get five per cent, from a grumbling and unsatisfactory set of tenants.  And what are you getting?  Twenty-one per cent. in this world and salvation in the next.  It’s the most damnable interest I ever heard tell of, either in this world or any other.’

Yet another tale about him.

He had received an unconscionable bill of costs from an attorney, and happening to meet a Roman Catholic bishop in Cork, he asked him if an attorney could ever be saved.

’Why not?  Even an extortioner can be if he make ample restitution in his life-time, and dies fortified with the rites of the Church.’

‘May be so, my lord,’ replied Sir James, ’you know more about these things than I do, but if it is as you say, you are taking a confounded amount of unnecessary trouble about the rest of us.’

The bishop was not a bit disconcerted.

‘I am an honest labourer striving to be worthy of my hire,’ he explained.

And at that Sir James left it, because he said it was not respectful to ask too many invidious questions about a man who had the making of your soul at his own will.

All this is a digression from my education, which was as desultory as these reminiscences.

After a spell at Limerick I was again sent home ill, and for six months I really had to be treated as an invalid.  I was always very fond of books, notably history, and I think I have read pretty well every book published upon the history of Ireland.  It was at this time I began teaching myself a bit, and that is the teaching which is better than any other, except what one has to learn against one’s own will and for one’s own advantage in the school of life.  Like a good many other people I was led to history not only by a shortage of lighter books at home, but also by curiosity aroused by the novels of Sir Walter Scott.  In the way of promoting better reading, I believe Scott has been far more beneficial than any other writer of fiction in English.