l would have been expected of him, far more than the dwindling means
of Roscarna could possibly supply, and since every career seemed closed
to him but one of provincial dissipation he is scarcely to be blamed for
having followed it.

When Colonel Hoylake knew him he was a middle-aged man and a reformed
character, and the fact that he ever came to be either is enough to show
that the original Hewish strain was still strong enough to put up some
sort of fight. He cannot have been without his share of original virtue,
but by his own account, his youth, hopeless and therefore abandoned, must
have been pretty lurid. Of course he drank. His father must have taught
him to do that as a matter of habit. He was equally at home with the
ancient sherries, a few bins of which remained in the Roscarna cellars to
remind him of the Spanish trading days, or with the liquid fire that the
Joyces distilled in the mountains under the name of potheen.

Of course he gambled. He was sufficiently Irish for that: and his gaming
passion soon made Roscarna a sort of savage Monte Carlo, to which the
more dissolute younger sons of the surrounding gentry foregathered:
Blakes and O'fflahertys, and Kilkellys, and all the rest of them.

In the middle of the stables, at the back of the house, stood a huge
deserted pigsty surrounded by a stone wall, and this place became under
Jocelyn's regime, a cockpit, in which desperate birds were pitted against
one another, fighting fiercely until they dropped. Even in his later
days according to Hoylake, he was not ashamed of these exploits. The
gamblers invented for themselves new refinements of sport or cruelty.
Spider-racing. I do not suppose that anyone living to-day knows what
spider-racing is. This was the manner of it. At night, when the big
black-bellied spiders that haunted the lofts came out to spread their
nets, stable-boys were sent with candles to collect them in tins, and
next morning, when the gamblers assembled in the pigsty at Roscarna a
piece of sheet iron, fired to a dull red heat would be placed in the
centre. On this hot surface the long-legged insects were thrown.
Naturally they must run or be shrivelled with heat. And the one that ran
the furthest was counted the winner. Betting on these unfortunate
creatures Jocelyn and his friends spent many happy forenoons, and Jocelyn
was counted as good a judge of a spider as any man in Galway. In his
dealings with women he was relatively