The old posting hotels used to be uncommonly good and comfortable, whilst they did a thriving trade.  The coach purported to give you ample time to breakfast and dine at certain capital hostels, but by a private arrangement between mine host and the guard and driver, the meals used to be abruptly closured in order to save the landlord’s larder.

On the way down from Dublin, a thirty minutes’ pause was allowed at Naas for breakfast; but on the occasion of my story, as well as on every other, after a quarter of an hour the waiter announced the coach was just starting.

Everybody ran out to regain their seats, except one commercial traveller, who picked up all the teaspoons and put them in the teapot before calmly resuming his meal.

Back came the waiter with:—­

‘Not a moment to spare, sir.’

‘All right,’ said the traveller; ’which of the passengers has taken the teaspoons?’

The waiter gave one glance of horror, and then proceeded to have every one on the coach examined for the missing articles.

By the time that the commercial traveller had calmly finished a hearty meal there was nearly a riot, and then he emerged from the coffee-room, and suggested that the waiter had better look in the teapot.

By the way, I don’t fancy that he regularly travelled on that road, for he would have been a marked man at Naas for years to come.

I was seventeen at the time when I had decided, with parental acquiescence, to be a farmer, and I was sent to learn my profession to the south of Scotland, to a farmer named Bogue.

I there acquired, at all events, one curious fact, which has stuck in my head ever since, and it is thus:—­

Scotland and Ireland are governed by the same Sovereign, Lords, and Commons.  Scotland is the best farmed country in Europe, and Ireland about the worst.

One pair of horses in Scotland were then supposed to cultivate fifty acres of tillage, and in Ireland the average was one horse to five acres.  Indeed it is in both cases much the same to-day.

In reality a farm is a workshop from which you turn out as much produce as possible.  But on an Irish farm it is the habit to squeeze out the last possible ounce without putting anything in, for it is not run with an eye on future years, but only in a hand-to-mouth, beggar-the-soil kind of way, without a thought beyond contemporary exigencies.

There were several other pupils with Bogue, but I stuck to the business more than the rest, who were perpetually gallivanting into Kelso, or even going up to Edinburgh, where they learnt nothing which taught them their trade or put money into their pockets.  Therefore it happened that I was selected by Bogue to have an excellent practical demonstration of farming, after this wise.  He had a pretty sharp illness, and left me for a short time full management of all his six hundred acres, and that bit of responsibility made a man of me once and for all.  I stepped out of boyhood instantly, and became an adult in feelings and bearing; but to this day I hope my sense of fun is only keener than it was as a lad.