The tracks next morning revealed he had been riding round and round the house without once quitting the vicinity, which was almost as bad as Mark Twain’s famous nocturnal perambulation with his pedometer, when he went on a tramp abroad!

Of potation stories I could tell scores more, and the Tralee Club has seen enough whisky imbibed within its walls to drown all the members.

A quaint character named Mullane was at one time steward, and decidedly astonished a member, who was a total abstainer, by charging him in his bill for three tumblers of punch.

‘Well,’ explained Mullane, ’it’s this way.  Some take six tumblers, and some takes none, so I strikes an average—­and to tell you the truth, it’s mighty convenient for the great majority.’

A quaint member of the club was Mr. Edward Morris.  He was extremely diminutive, and he wore an eyeglass.  One evening he was standing on the first landing, pondering in a bemused state whether he could get downstairs without falling, when a pursey little doctor trotted past him without even touching the bannister.

This inspired Morris with courage, so he let go his hold of the balustrade, whereupon he promptly fell on the physician, and both rolled to the bottom of the stairs.

Thence in hiccuping tones were heard:—­

’Waiter!  Waiter, put the glass in my eye, and let me see who the scoundrel was who struck me.’

On another evening in the club, when he had imbibed very freely, he ordered an additional glass of grog, and began to moralise aloud, addressing it after this fashion:—­

’Glass of grog, if I drink you now, you’ll cut the legs from under me.  And yet I want you, and I will not do without you.  So I know what I will do.  I’ll go to bed and I’ll drink you there, for I don’t care a damn what you do to me then.’

The indifference of a drunken man to subsequent consequences was rather quaintly shown by that weird individual Dr. Tanner, when he went up to Sir Ellis Ashmead Bartlett in the lobby of the House of Commons, and abruptly observed:—­

‘You’re a fool.’

Sir Ellis fixed him with his eyeglass, and, in disgusted tones, replied:—­

‘You’re drunk.’

‘I suppose so,’ retorted the Irishman, ’but then I’ll be sober to-morrow’—­in the most plaintive tone, then in a crescendo of scorn—­’ whereas you’ll always be a fool.’

Moreover as he slouched down the lobby, he was heard to say:—­

’If I do get a headache, I’ve a head to have it in, not a frame on which to hang an eyeglass.’

That is a political amenity on which I will not dwell.

Very little money-lending is to be heard of in the south of Ireland, and in all my experience I only remember one case in Kerry.  Tenants in Ireland, however, have great horror of breaking bulk, and many of them will do a bill for a neighbour when they have deposits in the bank for themselves.  As it is a point of honour never to refuse a friend in this respect, you can easily imagine the amount of ‘paper’ which is fluttering.