On arriving at the Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park, my brother and I were much relieved at finding that we were not expected to live perpetually surrounded by men in full uniform and by ladies in smart dresses, as we had gathered that we were fated to do during the morning’s ceremonies at Dublin Castle.

The Viceregal Lodge is a large, unpretentious, but most comfortable house, standing in really beautiful grounds.  The 160 acres of its enclosure have been laid out with such skill as to appear to the eye double or treble the extent they actually are.  The great attraction to my brother and me lay in a tract of some ten acres of woodland which had been allowed to run entirely wild.  We soon peopled this very satisfactorily with two tribes of Red Indians, two bands of peculiarly bloodthirsty robbers, a sufficiency of bears, lions and tigers, and an appalling man-eating dragon.  I fear that in view of the size of the little wood, these imported inhabitants must have had rather cramped quarters.

The enacting of the role of a Red Indian “brave” was necessarily a little fatiguing, for according to Fenimore Cooper, our guide in these matters, it was essential to keep up an uninterrupted series of guttural grunts of “Ug!  Ug!” the invariable manner in which his “braves” prefaced their remarks.

There was perhaps little need for the imaginary menagerie, for the Dublin Zoological Gardens adjoined the “Lodge” grounds, and were accessible to us at any time with a private key.  The Dublin Zoo had always been very successful in breeding lions, and derived a large amount of their income from the sale of the cubs.  They consequently kept a number of lions, and the roaring of these lions at night was very audible at the Viceregal Lodge, only a quarter of a mile away.  When I told the boys at school, with perfect truth, that in Dublin I was nightly lulled to sleep by the gentle roaring of lions round my couch, I was called a young liar.

There is a pretty lake inside the Viceregal grounds.  My two elder brothers were certain that they had seen wild duck on this lake in the early morning, so getting up in the dusk of a December morning, they crept down to the lake with their guns.  With the first gleam of dawn, they saw that there were plenty of wild fowl on the water, and they succeeded in shooting three or four of them.  When daylight came, they retrieved them with a boat, but were dismayed at finding that these birds were neither mallards, nor porchards, nor any known form of British duck; their colouring, too, seemed strangely brilliant.  Then they remembered the neighbouring Zoo, with its ornamental ponds covered with rare imported and exotic waterfowl, and they realised what they had done.  It is quite possible that they had killed some unique specimens, imported at fabulous cost from Central Africa, or from the heart of the Australian continent, some priceless bird that was the apple of the eye of the Curator of the Gardens, so we buried the episode and the birds, in profound secrecy.