’If you do not keep quiet, I shall send to the next Court for my brother.’

Another judge had applied for shares in a company of which a friend of his was secretary.  Meeting him in Sackville Street, he stopped him to inquire what would be the paid-up capital of the concern.

The other forgot whom he was addressing, and blurted out the truth by replying:—­

’Well, I really cannot tell you just yet, but the cheques are coming in fast.’

The judge withdrew his application by the next post, and confidently expected to see his friend in the dock.  I believe in less than six months he was not disappointed.

The poorer class in Ireland do not appear to be business-like in the ordinary sense, however much they may develop commercial instincts after emigrating.  It is to promote the latent capacity obviously within their power that creameries and other assisted promotions have been started in various parts of the country, sometimes with great success.  Sir Horace Plunkett and others have dealt with all this in the most serious spirit.  I prefer to allude to it, and add one anecdote.

A lady asked a respectable old woman how her son was getting on as manager of the creamery, and the reply came after the following fashion:—­

’Whisna the poor man and all the trouble he has, and him never able to make the butter and the books scoromund,’ which, being translated, is ‘correspond.’

Another example I can cite of the difficulty in getting people to put their intelligence to practical use in the south is to this effect:—­

There was a certain widdy woman in a neighbouring parish who was making great lamentation over her ‘pitaties’ to the priest, and in consequence he lent her a machine for the purpose of spraying them.  She professed the profoundest gratitude as well as interest in the implement, but the task speedily became too big an effort, for she subsequently informed me that she had sprayed ’half the field to plase his Rivirence, but left the rest to God.’

And that is the kind of negative piety which is distinctly a characteristic Irish trait.

CHAPTER XV

LORD-LIEUTENANTS AND CHIEF SECRETARIES

Any Irishman who has reached the shady side of threescore years and ten must remember many Lord-Lieutenants—­the pompously visible symbols of much vacillating misdirection.

To analyse them would be the work of an historian, to criticise would be superfluous.  They have been so many Malvolios, all alike anxious to win the favour of that capricious Lady Olivia Erin, and not one of them has succeeded, though several have merited better fortune than they met with on Irish soil.

The first Lord-Lieutenant I personally met was Lord Carlisle.

He was a gentleman, but not otherwise remarkable.  He had come into the Government on the resignation of the Peelites, and his popularity in Ireland was greater than any other holder of the post in the century, possibly owing to his negative qualities, and also to a charm of manner more effusive than usual among Englishmen.