had sufficient; indeed, sufficient seems rather an elastic term, judging by what I saw and what I was told.  It must have been rather like one of the scenes described by Charles Lever in his books.  In 1866 political, religious, and racial animosities had not yet assumed the intensely bitter character they have since reached in Ireland, and the traditional Irish wit, at present apparently dormant, still flashed, sparkled and scintillated.  From my hiding-place in the gallery I could only hear the roars of laughter the good stories provoked, I could not hear the stories themselves, possibly to my own advantage.

Judge Keogh had a great reputation as a wit.  The then Chief Justice was a remarkable-looking man on account of his great snow-white whiskers and his jet-black head of hair.  My mother, commenting on this, said to Judge Keogh, “Surely Chief Justice Monaghan must dye his hair.”  “To my certain knowledge he does not,” answered Keogh.  “How, then, do you account for the difference in colour between his whiskers and his hair?” asked my mother.  “To the fact that, throughout his life, he has used his jaw a great deal more than he ever has his brain,” retorted Keogh.

Father Healy, most genial and delightful of men, belongs, of course, to a much later period.  I was at the Castle in Lord Zetland’s time, when Father Healy had just returned from a fortnight’s visit to Monte Carlo, where he had been the guest (of all people in the world!) of Lord Randolph Churchill.  “May I ask how you explained your absence to your flock, Father Healy?” asked Lady Zetland.  “I merely told them that I had been for a fortnight’s retreat to Carlow; I thought it superfluous prefixing the Monte,” answered the priest.  Again at a wedding, the late Lord Morris, the possessor of the hugest brogue ever heard, observed as the young couple drove off, “I wish that I had an old shoe to throw after them for luck.”  “Throw your brogue after them, my dear fellow; it will do just as well,” flashed out Father Healy.  It was Father Healy, too, who, in posting a newly arrived lady as to Dublin notabilities, said, “You will find that there are only two people who count in Dublin, the Lady-Lieutenant and Lady Iveagh, her Ex. and her double X,” for the marks on the barrels of the delicious beverage brewed by the Guinness family must be familiar to most people.

I myself heard Father Healy, in criticising a political appointment which lay between a Welsh and a Scotch M.P., say, “Well, if we get the Welshman he’ll pray on his knees all Sunday, and then prey on his neighbours the other six days of the week; whilst if we get the Scotchman hell keep the Sabbath and any other little trifles he can lay his hand on.”  Healy, who was parish priest of Little Bray, used to entertain sick priests from the interior of Ireland who were ordered sea-bathing.  One day he saw one of his guests, a young priest, rush into the sea, glass in hand, and begin drinking the sea water.  “You mustn’t do that, my dear fellow,” cried Father Healy, aghast.  “I didn’t know that there was any harm in it, Father Healy,” said the young priest.  “Whist! we’ll not say one word about it, and maybe then they’ll never miss the little drop you have taken.”