Terrible as were the results of the Abergele accident, they might have been more disastrous still, for both lines were torn up, and the up Irish mail from Holyhead, which would be travelling at a great pace down the steep bank from Llandulas, was due at any moment.  The front guard of our train had been killed by the collision, and the rear guard was seriously hurt, so there was no one to give orders.  It occurred at once to my eldest brother, the late Duke, that as the train was standing on a sharp incline, the uninjured carriages would, if uncoupled, roll down the hill of their own accord.  He and some other passengers accordingly managed to undo the couplings, and the uninjured coaches, detached from the burning ones, glided down the incline into safety.  From the half-stunned guard my brother learned that the nearest signal-box was at Llandulas, a mile away.  He ran there at the top of his speed, and arrived in time to get the up Irish mail and all other traffic stopped.  On his return my brother had a prolonged fainting fit, as the strain on his heart had been very great.  It took the doctors over an hour to bring him round, and we all thought that he had died.

I was eleven years old at the time, and the shock of the collision, the sight of the burning coaches, the screams of the women, the wreckage, and my brother’s narrow escape from death, affected me for some little while afterwards.

It was the custom then for the Lord-Lieutenant to live for three months of the winter at the Castle, where a ceaseless round of entertainments went on.  The Castle was in the heart of Dublin, and only boasted a dull little smoke-blackened garden in the place of the charming grounds of the Lodge, still there was plenty going on there.  A band played daily in the Castle Yard for an hour, there was the daily guard-mounting, and the air was thick with bugle calls and rattling kettle-drums.

At “Drawing Rooms” it was still the habit for all ladies to be kissed by the Lord-Lieutenant on being presented to him, and every lady had to be re-presented to every fresh Viceroy.  This imposed an absolute orgy of compulsory osculation on the unfortunate Lord-Lieutenant, for if many of the ladies were fresh, young and pretty, the larger proportion of them were very distinctly the reverse.

There is a very fine white-and-gold throne-room in Dublin, decorated in the heavy but effective style of George IV., and it certainly compares very favourably with the one at Buckingham Palace.  St. Patrick’s Hall, too, with its elaborate painted ceiling, is an exceedingly handsome room, as is the Long Gallery.  At my father’s first Drawing-Room, when I officiated as page, the perpetual kissing tickled my fancy so, that, forgetting that to live up to my new white-satin breeches and lace ruffles I ought to wear an impassive countenance, I absolutely shook, spluttered and wriggled with laughter.  The ceremony appeared to me interminable, for ten-year-old legs soon get tired, and ten-year-old