‘O tempora!  O mores!’

His father instantly retorted:—­

‘You get me the temporary, and I’ll promptly see we have more ease.’

In the bad times, an old woman came into the office at Tralee to pay her rent.  Mr. Francis Denny was in a real bad humour with somebody else who had defaulted, and he was raging along in a manner qualified to display his intimate acquaintance with the florid embellishments of the language.  The old woman listened with evident admiration for some time.  At last she ejaculated:—­

‘Ah, the nate little man.’

And with that slipped out, without settling her account.

Mr. Francis Denny has the misfortune to be rather lame, and one day another old woman, who liked him, observed:—­

’If he had two sound legs under him, there’d be no holding him in Tralee, but he’d be up at the Castle setting the Lord Lieutenant right in his many errors, not to mention going over to London to give the Queen herself a bit of his mind.’

In the bad times, one lady was left in her Kerry residence with her baby boy and a pack of maidservants, her husband having been called over to England.

She had sixty pounds of gold in her bedroom, and one night a housemaid rushed in to say a party of moonlighters were in the house.

The lady threw a sovereign and some silver on to the dressing-table, and hid the rest under her mattress.

In came the masked scoundrels asking for gold, and when she pointed to the money that was visible, one replied that it was not enough.

‘Very well,’ she said, ‘give me your name and I’ll write you a cheque.’

On that they left precipitately, to her intense relief.

All moonlighters calculated upon the terrorism their appearance would cause, and if this was apparently conspicuous by its absence they were nonplussed, because they never felt over secure in their own hearts at the best of times, and grew frightened directly others were not frightened by them.

In all moonlighting affrays no one scoundrel ever became personally conspicuous as a leader, and all the wisest leaders, such as Stephens, Tynan, and Parnell, shrouded their movements in mystery.  Fenianism in Ireland since Emmett has never had one capable leader possessing the physical courage to show himself in the forefront on all occasions.

On the other hand, it is a singular fact that nearly every general of note in the army of the United Kingdom, since the time of Marlborough, has come from Ireland.  The Duke of Wellington was born in County Meath, Lord Gough in Tipperary, Lord Wolseley in County Carlow, Lord Roberts in Waterford, Sir George White in Antrim, General French in Roscommon, and Lord Kitchener in Kerry.

The attempts of the English Government to manufacture an English general in the South African war were a miserable fiasco.  They only produced one, Sir Charles Tucker, and he did his best to atone for the accident of his English birth by marrying a Kerry lady.