lossal failures--the
Irishman retains this delicate blade for his enemies, for his friends,
for himself, the ancestral dagger of fast sharp speaking from fast sharp
seeing--an inheritance which could move the world. And the Royal Irish
Constabulary fished for trout in the adjacent streams.

Mrs. Kearney keeps the hotel. In Ireland male innkeepers die young.
Apparently they succumb to conviviality when it is presented to them in
the guise of a business duty. Naturally honest, temperate men, their
consciences are lulled to false security by this idea of hard drinking
being necessary to the successful keeping of a public-house. It is very
terrible.

But they invariably leave behind them capable widows, women who do not
recognise conviviality as a business obligation. And so all through
Ireland one finds these brisk widows keeping hotels with a precision
that is almost military.

In Kearney's there is always a wonderful collection of old women, bent
figures shrouded in shawls who reach up scrawny fingers to take their
little purchases from Mary Agnes, who presides sometimes at the bar, but
more often at the shop that fronts it in the same room. In the gloom of
a late afternoon these old women are as mystic as the swinging, chanting
witches on a dark stage when the thunder-drum rolls and the lightning
flashes by schedule. When a grey rain sweeps through the narrow street
of Ballydehob, and makes heavy shadows in Kearney's tap-room, these old
creatures, with their high mournful voices, and the mystery of their
shawls, their moans and aged mutterings when they are obliged to take a
step, raise the dead superstitions from the bottom of a man's mind.

"My boy," remarked my London friend cheerfully, "these might have
furnished sons to be Aldermen or Congressmen in the great city of New
York."

"Aldermen or Congressmen of the great city of New York always take care
of their mothers," I answered meekly.

On a barrel, over in a corner, sat a yellow-bearded Irish farmer in
tattered clothes who wished to exchange views on the Armenian massacres.
He had much information and a number of theories in regard to them. He
also advanced the opinion that the chief political aim of Russia at
present is in the direction of China, and that it behoved other Powers
to keep an eye on her. He thought the revolutionists in Cuba would never
accept autonomy at the hands of Spain. His pipe glowed comfortably from
his corner; waving the tuppenny gl