akes none, so I strikes an average--and to tell you the truth,
it's mighty convenient for the great majority.'

A quaint member of the club was Mr. Edward Morris. He was extremely
diminutive, and he wore an eyeglass. One evening he was standing on the
first landing, pondering in a bemused state whether he could get
downstairs without falling, when a pursey little doctor trotted past him
without even touching the bannister.

This inspired Morris with courage, so he let go his hold of the
balustrade, whereupon he promptly fell on the physician, and both rolled
to the bottom of the stairs.

Thence in hiccuping tones were heard:--

'Waiter! Waiter, put the glass in my eye, and let me see who the
scoundrel was who struck me.'

On another evening in the club, when he had imbibed very freely, he
ordered an additional glass of grog, and began to moralise aloud,
addressing it after this fashion:--

'Glass of grog, if I drink you now, you'll cut the legs from under me.
And yet I want you, and I will not do without you. So I know what I will
do. I'll go to bed and I'll drink you there, for I don't care a damn
what you do to me then.'

The indifference of a drunken man to subsequent consequences was rather
quaintly shown by that weird individual Dr. Tanner, when he went up to
Sir Ellis Ashmead Bartlett in the lobby of the House of Commons, and
abruptly observed:--

'You're a fool.'

Sir Ellis fixed him with his eyeglass, and, in disgusted tones,
replied:--

'You're drunk.'

'I suppose so,' retorted the Irishman, 'but then I'll be sober
to-morrow'--in the most plaintive tone, then in a crescendo of scorn--'
whereas you'll always be a fool.'

Moreover as he slouched down the lobby, he was heard to say:--

'If I do get a headache, I've a head to have it in, not a frame on which
to hang an eyeglass.'

That is a political amenity on which I will not dwell.

Very little money-lending is to be heard of in the south of Ireland, and
in all my experience I only remember one case in Kerry. Tenants in
Ireland, however, have great horror of breaking bulk, and many of them
will do a bill for a neighbour when they have deposits in the bank for
themselves. As it is a point of honour never to refuse a friend in this
respect, you can easily imagine the amount of 'paper' which is
fluttering.

Even when a farmer has a tidy sum of money on deposit with the bank at
one per cent., if he wants to employ a sum for a short time, say fo