h me with perfect
safety. I have _not_ kissed the Blarney Stone.

But that is not what I started in to tell. Of course I could have gone
out there in our automobile; but that would be a fine way to visit
Blarney Castle, wouldn't it? Yes, it wouldn't. When you are in Ireland
do as the Romans do. So we put the auto in a garage (and over there that
word does not have any of the French curlicues we put on it, with the
last syllable accented. It is pronounced to rhyme with the word
carriage) and embarked in a jaunting (or jolting) car.

Our driver was a regular lad; several years ago I wrote a monologue for
Marshall P. Wilder, and during this trip this driver told me the whole
monologue. And then he had some other encore stuff too.

We were passing an insane asylum and he said that the previous summer he
had driven a doctor from Philadelphia out to this asylum; and while
there a very funny thing had happened. As the doctor was passing along
through one of the wards--Now the driver of an Irish jaunting car sits
way up in front, right over the horse's tail, and the passengers sit
back of him, facing off sideways; so the driver has to turn his head to
talk to the passengers. Up to this point of his story this driver had
been turned toward me, telling his story to me; but now he happened to
think that it would be more polite to tell it to the ladies; so he
turned around back to me and told the rest of it to them. I did not hear
a word of it; but when the finish came, and the ladies laughed, I
laughed, just to be polite.

And when the laughter had died down I said,

"That puts me in mind of a story I heard over in America. A man was
passing an insane asylum and he noticed a clock up on one of the towers;
but there was some half hour's difference between his watch and the
clock; and while he was standing there trying to figure out which was
right, one of the patients stuck his head out of a window right beside
the clock. The man below saw him and called up to him,

"'Hey, there: is that clock right?'"

"And the patient replied,

'No; if it was it wouldn't be in here.'"

Honest, if I hadn't known I was in Cork, Ireland, I should have thought
I was playing Toronto, Canada; there wasn't a ripple; the driver gave me
one disgusted look, hit the horse a cut with the whip and drove on in
silence. My wife looked at me angrily and shook her head.

"All right," I said to myself. "You are a Mutt audience and I shall
relate no mor