a sitting-room, or coffee-room as it was announced to be by an
appellation painted on the door. There was but one window to the
room, which looked into the street, and was always clouded by a
dingy-red curtain. The floor was uncarpeted, nearly black with dirt,
and usually half covered with fragments of damp straw brought into
it by the feet of customers. A strong smell of hot whisky and water
always prevailed, and the straggling mahogany table in the centre
of the room, whose rickety legs gave way and came off whenever an
attempt was made to move it, was covered by small greasy circles, the
impressions of the bottoms of tumblers which had been made by the
overflowing tipple. Over the chimney there was a round mirror, the
framework of which was bedizened with all manner of would-be gilt
ornaments, which had been cracked, and twisted, and mended till it
was impossible to know what they had been intended to represent; and
the whole affair had become a huge receptacle of dust, which fell in
flakes upon the chimney-piece when it was invaded. There was a second
table opposite the window, more rickety than that in the centre;
and against the wall opposite to the fireplace there was an old
sideboard, in the drawers of which Tom, the one-eyed waiter, kept
knives and forks, and candle-ends, and bits of bread, and dusters.
There was a sour smell, as of old rancid butter, about the place,
to which the guests sometimes objected, little inclined as they
generally were to be fastidious. But this was a tender subject, and
not often alluded to by those who wished to stand well in the good
graces of Tom. Many things much annoyed Tom; but nothing annoyed him
so fearfully as any assertion that the air of the Kanturk Hotel was
not perfectly sweet and wholesome.

Behind the coffee-room was the bar, from which Fanny O'Dwyer
dispensed dandies of punch and goes of brandy to her father's
customers from Kanturk. For at this, as at other similar
public-houses in Irish towns, the greater part of the custom on
which the publican depends came to him from the inhabitants of one
particular country district. A large four-wheeled vehicle, called
a long car, which was drawn by three horses, and travelled over a
mountain road at the rate of four Irish miles an hour, came daily
from Kanturk to Cork, and daily returned. This public conveyance
stopped in Cork at the Kanturk Hotel, and was owned by the owner of
that house, in partnership with a brother in the