Upon returning from school for my first holidays, I learnt that my father had been appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and that we were in consequence to live now for the greater portion of the year in Dublin.

We were all a little doubtful as to how we should like this new departure.  Dublin was, of course, fairly familiar to us from our stays there, when we travelled to and from the north of Ireland.  Some of the minor customs of the “sixties” seem so remote now that it may be worth while recalling them.  In common with most Ulster people, we always stayed at the Bilton Hotel in Dublin, a fine old Georgian house in Sackville Street.  Everything at the Bilton was old, solid, heavy, and eminently respectable.  All the plate was of real Georgian silver, and all the furniture in the big gloomy bedrooms was of solid, not veneered, mahogany.  Quite invariably my father was received in the hall, on arrival, by the landlord, with a silver candlestick in his hand.  The landlord then proceeded ceremoniously to “light us upstairs” to a sitting-room on the first floor, although the staircase was bright with gas.  This was a survival from the eighteenth century, when staircases and passages in inns were but dimly lit; but it was an attention that was expected.  In the same way, when dinner was ready in our sitting-room, the landlord always brought in the silver soup-tureen with his own hands, placed it ceremoniously before my father, and removed the cover with a great flourish; after which he retired, and left the rest to the waiter.  This was another traditional attention.

Towards the end of dinner it became my father’s turn to repay these civilities.  Though he himself very rarely touched wine, he would look down the wine-list until he found a peculiarly expensive port.  This he would order for what was then termed “the good of the house.”  When this choice product of the Bilton bins made its appearance, wreathed in cobwebs, in a wicker cradle, my father would send the waiter with a message to the landlord, “My compliments to Mr. Massingberg, and will he do me the favour of drinking a glass of wine with me.”  So the landlord would reappear, and, sitting down opposite my father, they would solemnly dispose of the port, and let us trust that it never gave either of them the faintest twinge of gout.  These little mutual attentions were then expected on both sides.  Neither my father nor mother ever used the word “hotel” in speaking of any hostelry in the United Kingdom.  Like all their contemporaries, they always spoke of an “inn.”

In 1860 a new contract had been signed with the Post Office by the London and North-Western Railway and the City of Dublin Steam-Packet Co., by which they jointly undertook to convey the mails between London and Dublin in eleven hours.  Up to 1860, the time occupied by the journey was from fourteen to sixteen hours.  Everything in this world being relative, this was rapidity itself compared to the five days