Mr. Crosbie Moore had not much sense of humour, as the following tale will show.

He was presiding at Ballyporeen Petty Sessions, when a village tailor was summoned for having his pig wandering on the road.

The fellow pleaded that it was due to great curiosity on the part of the pig, who saw some constabulary passing by, and rushed out to see what they were like.

He made this explanation in such humorous fashion that most of the magistrates were for letting him off; but Mr. Crosbie Moore said it was scandalous that they had directed the police to summon people on that very ground, and they wanted to acquit the culprit because he had made a joke.

The rest of the Bench had to acquiesce, and the tailor was fined one shilling.

He paid his shilling, and said:—­

’I have no blame to you at all, gentlemen, except to Mr. Crosbie Moore; and, indeed, if he reflected, he should have known that no live man could keep a woman or a pig in the house when she wanted to be off.’

A subscription raised for him outside the Court realised twenty-three shillings.

Tradition goes that when Lord Kimberley, Lord Carlingford, and Lord Granville were all in Mr. Gladstone’s Cabinet, Mr. Chamberlain—­then at the Board of Trade—­in a moment of vexation called them ’Gladstone’s grannies,’ and if the phrase is not his, it most certainly was apt and truthful.

Lord Kimberley was known as ‘Pussy’ among a gang of disrespectful subordinates.  He really did as little to earn respect as he did to forfeit it; in fact he was a pre-eminently respectable mediocrity of the kind that, towards the close of the mid-Victorian period, clung like barnacles to office, and he was a Whig during the period that Whiggism was growing obsolete.

The Duke of Abercorn certainly had no tendencies towards the lavish extravagance by which a modern Lord-Lieutenant has to pay his footing.  A short time before he was chosen he had claimed the Dukedom of Chatelherault in France, and was known in consequence among the malcontents as the ‘French Frog.’  His wife was the daughter of one Duke of Bedford, and when another came to stay at the viceregal, it was for a time called the ‘Dukeries.’  The A.D.C.’s, who were particularly good-looking, were at once known as the ‘Duckeries.’

The Duke of Marlborough settled down well to his work.  He was frankly the friend of the landlords, and did his best for them.  But he brought no English politicians in his train; he never thought he could settle every Irish question after he had smoked a pipe over it; and he was never inaccessible.

He came on a visit to Muckross when Sir Ivor Guest had the shooting, and I dined there to meet him.  He visited Killarney on several occasions, and on each of them I had long talks with him.  I always thought him a painstaking, well-meaning man.