Arrived at Ballinasloe we established ourselves in quarters that were part of the original station premises.  These consisted of a good sized dining-room, six bedrooms, and an office for the manager and his clerk.  The walls and ceilings of the rooms were sheeted with pitch pine and varnished.  They were very plainly furnished, the only thing in the way of decoration being a production in watercolour representing a fair green crowded with herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, and adorned with sundry pastoral and agricultural emblems, from the brush of my friend Cynicus.  This I framed and hung in the dining-room.  As it had columns for recording statistics of the fair for a period of years, it was instructive as well as ornamental.  Three of the bedrooms were on the ground floor and were small apartments.  The upstair rooms were much larger, were situated in the roof, and were lit by skylight windows which commanded a limited view of the firmament above but none whatever of the green earth below.  These upper rooms were reached by an almost perpendicular staircase surmounted by a trap door, a mode of access convenient enough for the young and active, but not suitable for those of us who had passed their meridian.  Two of these rooms were double-bedded and all three led into each other.  In the innermost, Atock, our locomotive engineer, and I chummed together.  He had slept there for many years, with two previous managers, and, in Robinson Crusoe fashion, had recorded the years by notches in a beam of the ceiling.  The notches for him then counted twenty-three years, and number one he notched for me.  Every morning an old jackdaw perched on a chimney outside our skylight, and entertained us with his chatter.  Atock said the old bird had perched there during all his time; and as long as I visited Ballinasloe—­a period of nearly twenty years, he regularly reappeared.

To be able once a year to entertain friends and customers of the company was one of the reasons, probably the main reason, why the directors passed the fair week at Ballinasloe.  Their hospitality was not limited to invitations to dinner, for guests were welcomed, without special invitation, to breakfast and lunch and light refreshments during the day.  It was an arrangement which gave pleasure to both hosts and guests, and was not without advantage to the company.  A good dinner solves many a difficulty, whilst the post-prandial cigar and a glass of grog, like faith, removes mountains.  One who, in the last century, became a great English statesman (Lord John Russell) when twenty years of age was in Spain.  The Duc d’Infantado was President of the Spanish Ministry at the time.  The Duke of Wellington was there too, and great banquets were being given.  The Duc had more than once visited Lord John’s home and enjoyed its hospitality, but he neglected to invite Lord John to any of his banquets; and this is the cutting comment which the youthful future statesman recorded in his diary:  “The Infantado, notwithstanding the champagne and burgundy he got at Woburn, has not asked me.  Shabby fellow!  It is clear he is unfit for the government of a great kingdom.”