But we were anxious to see as much of the country and of the people as we could, and, besides, did not care for the mixed company sleeping in the huts.  We therefore managed to secure lodgings with the Widow Walsh, on the road leading from the Curragh to Suncroft.  The widow’s husband had but recently died, leaving her a pretty good farm, and, with the aid of her family—­one of them a fine, grown-up young man—­she was able to hold on to the land.  But the ready cash she got from the Curragh men who came to lodge with her was useful too.  It was a good big house of the kind, and the widow made use of every available inch of it, so that she had about a dozen of us in all.  Mrs. Walsh, though an easy-going soul herself, had a fine bouncing girl to help her, but, with a dozen hungry men coming with a rush at night, it used to be a scramble for the cooking utensils, as we were largely left to our own devices.  We used to leave early in the morning for our work on the Curragh, taking with us the materials for our breakfasts and dinners.  As to the cooking, some went to the canteen, while others got their meals wherever they happened to be working.  As there were plenty of chips and small cuttings of wood, only fit for that purpose, we used to make of these big fires on the short grass, and we boiled our water for tea or coffee and our eggs, and frizzled our chops or bacon at the end of a long stick.

I have mentioned before that whenever one finds work particularly laborious he is fairly certain to find Irishmen at it.  It was so at the Curragh.  When a carpenter or joiner lays down the boarding of a floor, if there is only a small quantity of it he planes it down himself to make an even surface.  But if there is a large quantity this does not pay, and the contractor brings in another artist called a “flogger,” who, in nine cases out of ten, in my time, was an Irishman.  It was generally given out as “piece work” to one man, the “master-flogger,” as you might term him, who employed the others.  One of these, a very decent Irishman, Tom Cassidy, whom I had known in Liverpool, had the contract for the work at the Curragh Camp, and he had about a score of his fellow-countrymen working for him.

Going back to Liverpool for a holiday, while my brother and I were still at the Curragh, honest Tom called on my father and mother, who knew him well.  They were glad to hear that he was lodging at the Widow Walsh’s, and could tell them all about their boys.  This he could do most truthfully without letting his imagination run away with him.  “Aye, indeed,” he said, “Barney and John are lodging in the one house with me, with a decent widow woman, and many a glass we had together at Igoe’s.”  Tom had put in this bit of “local colouring” about Igoe’s to show the good fellowship between us, but as their sons were both teetotalers, the old people knew that this could not be true, and the rest of his story was somewhat discredited in consequence.