Chapter 8

MYSELF, SOME FACTS, AND MANY STORIES

In 1850 I became agent to the Colthurst property, which consisted of most of the parish of Ballyvourney, one estate alone containing about twenty-three thousand acres. The rental was then over £4600. There were only three slated houses on the property, hardly any out-buildings, only seven miles of road under contract, and about twenty acres planted.

By 1880 the landlord had expended £30,000 on improvements, there were over one hundred slated houses, about sixty miles of roads, and over four hundred acres planted.

Under the Land Act of 1881 the rent was reduced to £3600.

That was the encouragement officially given to the landlord for assisting in the improvement of his property.

From the time of Moses downwards, the policy of all Governments has been to give relief to the debtor. By the Encumbered Estate Act, which was passed just after the famine, special relief was given to the creditor.

What the English view was may be taken from the _Times_--

'In a few years more, a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as is the Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.'

That is to say, English capital was at last to flow into Ireland for the purchase of encumbered estates, but the anticipation of course was erroneous.

English capital was placed for preference in Turkish and in Egyptian bonds, to the great loss of all concerned. As for Ireland, out of the first twenty millions realised by the new Court, over seventeen was Irish money; and at the outset there was an inevitable downward tendency of prices which involved heavy depreciation.

Credit was destroyed in Ireland, and every man who owed a shilling was utterly ruined. Had the Government given loans at a reasonable rate of interest, which would have amply repaid them, all this could have been saved. As it was, properties were sold like chairs and tables at a paltry auction, and in thousands of cases the judge expressed himself satisfied that the rent could have been considerably increased.

I knew one unfortunate shopkeeper who paid £6000 for a property under these circumstances; and in place of an increase of rent, the confiscators--that is to say the commissioners imposed by Mr. Gladstone--took a third of the rental off him.

Those purchasers who were English conceived when they bought properties that they would get as much from them as the solvent tenants were willing to pay. The legislation of Mr. Gladstone in coalition with the blunderbuss soon put an end to the pleasing delusion. It was one more of the English mistakes about Ireland, where, when the tenant is content to pay, the British Government and the Land League both combine to prevent him from offering a reasonable rent to a landlord.

As a matter of fact, even the most seditionary organs confessed that the tenants gained little and lost much by the change from the old type of landlord to the new, for the latter, being practical men, had no sympathy for the man who was permanently behindhand with his rent. And no one can say that this habitual arrear was a healthy stimulus to the moral wellbeing of the tenant himself, though he felt aggrieved at its being checked.

There is not the least need to sketch how I gradually became one of the largest land agents in Ireland. It has been published in other books, and would only prove wearisome if set out in detail in this volume. So I will merely observe that only two years after the big Fenian rising, as it was called--which I should describe as being composed of a rabble of less importance than the ragamuffins led by Wat Tyler--so little was I impressed by its magnitude that I went to live at Edenburn. There I laid out a lot of money in rebuilding the house, spending over £2000 in additions. This was most idiotic of me, because I had not counted on the infernal devices of Mr. Gladstone to render Ireland uninhabitable for peaceful and law-abiding folk.

When I first settled down there, labourers were working at eightpence or tenpence a day. Now the lowest rate is two shillings. The labourer rectified this rate by emigration, and if the farmers, who could more advantageously have emigrated, had done so, the cry for compulsory reduction would never have arisen.

Thus far I have dealt with facts and myself as concerned in them, but I propose now to relate a few stories, a thing more congenial to my temperament than any other form of conversational exercise. Whether it will equally commend itself to the reader is a matter on which I, as an aged novice in literature, though hopeful, am of course uncertain.

Indeed I am in exactly the predicament of a farmer's wife who was asked by the Dowager Lady Godfrey, after a month of marriage, how she liked her husband.

'I had plenty of recommendation with him,' was the reply, 'but I have not had enough trial of him yet to say for sure.'

There is a story about a honeymoon couple at Killarney which is worth telling.

The bridegroom had a valet, a good, faithful fellow, long in his service, but talkative, a thing his master loathed. He said to him:--

'John, I've often told you to hold your tongue about my affairs. This time I emphatically mean it. If you tell the people in the hotel that I am on my honeymoon, I'll sack you on the spot.'

So John promised to be as silent as the grave, but on the third afternoon, as the happy pair were ascending the stairs of the Victoria Hotel, they saw by the giggles and smirks of the chambermaids that their secret had been discovered.

The bridegroom rang his bell and went for John in a towering passion, but the fellow held his ground.

'Is it not unfair the way you are taking on? Sure the other servants did ask me if you were on your honeymoon, but I was even with them, for I told them "devil a bit, your honour was not going to marry the lady until next month."'

I do not know how that alliance turned out, but the happy pair left the hotel early next morning.

I can tell rather more about the matrimonial experiences of an Archdeacon at Cork, who married firstly a woman who was very fond of society. She died, and he then married another, who grew very stout. She also died, and the indefatigable cleric married as his third experiment a widow cursed with a very violent temper.

He was one day chaffed on the practical demonstration he had given to the Romish doctrine of the celibacy of the Church, when he said:--

'After all they were a trial, for I married the world, the flesh, and lastly the devil, and now I tremble whenever I think of recognition in eternity.'

This Cork story comes naturally, because at that time I was living near Cork and very happily too.

Now and again we took trips up to Dublin when I had business there.

I am not much of a playgoer, but in Dublin we always went to the theatre on the chance of hearing some of the proverbial wit of its gallery.

On one occasion, a lady in the play, when her lover had had some doubt of her fidelity, exclaimed:--

'Would there were a mirror in my side that you could see into my heart.'

Whereupon a voice from the gods shouted:--

'Would not a pain [_i.e._ pane] in your stomach do as well. I have one myself.'

Lord Chancellor Brady was of a notoriously convivial temperament, which did not prevent him being an admirable lawyer when he would allow his wits to get their heads above water, so to speak, though it was little enough that he used to dilute his spirits.

When Jenny Lind sang in some Italian opera, he occupied a seat in the vice-regal box, and gazed at her through a portentously enormous _lorgnette_.

This was too much for a wag in the gallery, who yelled:--

'Brady, me jewel, I'm glad to see you're fond of a big glass yet.'

At the time of the Crimean War, John Reynolds, a very energetic citizen, was perpetually raising the question about the dangerous practice of driving outside cars from the side instead of the box--in which he was undoubtedly right.

When he went to the theatre, a gallery boy shouted:--

'Three cheers for Alderman John Reynolds the hero of Kars.'

The Lord Mayor of the period who sat beside him was a tallow chandler, and the same spokesman shouted out:--

'Three cheers for his grease the Lord Mayor just back from the races at Tallagh.'

That sort of thing seems to be particularly indigenous, the only parallel being when undergraduates or medical students get gathered together.

The eloquence of Irish members in the House of Commons has really nothing to do with my reminiscences, but I remember one occasion when it was uncommonly well excelled by a stolid Englishman.

Fergus O'Connor--an Irishman, as his name betrays--was an ardent Chartist, and before the Reform Bill was introduced he said in the House that he had been accused of being a personal enemy of King William's. This was quite untrue, for if there were only good laws he did not care if the devil were King of England.

Sir Robert Peel replied:--

'When the honourable member is gratified by seeing the sovereign of his choice on the throne of these realms, I hope he will enjoy, and I am sure he will deserve, the confidence of the Crown.'

Whilst I am anecdotal, perhaps I had better say something about books into which my stories have been pressed. I was always given to telling tales, but of course my great time was when Lord Morris and I would sit trying to cap one another. If he were ever too idle to remember an anecdote of his own, he would reel off one of mine: as for his own fund of stories and humour ever approaching exhaustion, that was not to be thought of. He was far and away the wittiest man I ever met, and if I do not quote one of his tales on this page it is because no single sample can show the superb richness of his vintage, and more than one of his brand will be found scattered in the present volume.

I gave a good many anecdotes to my dear old friend Mr. W.R. Le Fanu--cheeriest of fishermen, kindest of jolly good fellows--for his garrulous book. He observes in his preface that he makes his first attempt at writing in his eight-and-seventieth year. I am nearly twenty-four months his senior when thus far on the road of these reminiscences. I also echo another phrase of his:--

'I trust I have said nothing to hurt the feelings of any of my fellow-countrymen.'

Just one quotation--and only a little one--which is not mine, but the warning which Sheridan Le Fanu, author of that capital novel _Uncle Silas_, gave in the _Dublin University Magazine_ against matrimony:--

'Marriage is like the smallpox. A man may have it mildly, but he generally carries the marks of it with him to his grave.'

And very true too in his division of an Irishman's life into three parts:--

'The first is that in which he is plannin' and conthrivin' all sorts of villainy and rascality; that is the period of youth and innocence. The second is that in which he is puttin' into practice the villainy and rascality he contrived before; that is the prime of life or the flower of manhood. The third and last period is that in which he is makin' his soul and preparin' for another world; that is the period of dotage.'

Shakespeare's seven ages of man may have been more poetical, but it does not betray a closer grip of the Irish temperament.

My other appearance as a literary ghost or rather as an anonymous contributor was when I supplied Mrs. O'Connell with stories for _The Last Count of the Irish Brigade_. That was about twenty years ago, and therefore long after the death of the hero who was uncle to the Liberator.

The writer was a daughter of Charles Bianconi, the originator of all the mail-cars in Ireland, who owned at one time sixteen hundred horses, and always laughed at the idea of any violence on the part of the peasantry, pointing out that though his cars daily covered four thousand miles in twenty-two counties, no injury was ever done to any of his property.

Mrs. O'Connell was married to a nephew of the great Dan, and he represented Kerry in Parliament for nearly thirty years. He was an intimate friend of Thackeray's, and gave him all the idioms of his delightful Irish ballads. This O'Connell was a clever, amusing fellow, and precious idle into the bargain.

I remember one story he told me.

Mrs. MacCarthy, near Millstreet, had a son, a small proprietor, and he got married. The mother-in-law lived with the daughter-in-law, who had rather grand ideas, and set up as parlour-maid in the house a raw lass just taken from the dairy.

One afternoon old Mrs. MacCarthy saw the parish priest coming to call, and told the girl if he asked for Mrs. MacCarthy to say she was not in but the dowager was.

Now the maid had never heard the word dowager in her life, but thought she would make a shot for it, so when his reverence asked if Mrs. MacCarthy was at home, she blurted out:--

'No, sir, but the badger is.'

And to her dying day the relic of deceased MacCarthy went by the name of 'the badger.'

Now it is really time I related how my own beauty was spoilt, by breaking my nose in 1858.

I was racing the present Knight of Kerry and a young gunner named Hickson--no relation--on the Strand, when the horse of the latter collided with my own, and they both fell at the same time. He was a loose rider, and being shot off some distance from his animal picked himself up unhurt. I had always a tight grip, so I got entangled in the saddle which twisted round, and my mare almost literally tore off my face with her hind hoof.

I walked back a quarter of a mile, trying to hold my face on to my head with my hand; and in a month's time I was able to get about again, which the doctor said was one of the quickest cases of healing he had ever known.

But I was absolutely unrecognised by my acquaintances when I reappeared, and Mr. Dillon the R.M. actually took me for a walk in Tralee to see the town, thinking I was a stranger, a situation the fun of which I heartily appreciated.

Before that infernal gallop I had a hooked nose like the Duke of Wellington; and it's lucky I got married when I did, for no one would have had me afterwards, though my own wife always says 'for shame' if I make the remark in her presence, God bless her.

When I went to the Abbey of St. Denis, near Paris, I told the verger I was very anxious to see the likeness of the saint who had walked for six miles with his head in his hand, because I was the nearest living counterpart, having walked a quarter of a mile with my face in mine.

Hickson was universally congratulated on his lucky escape. He went out to India and was dead in eighteen months, and here am I at eighty with half my face and some of my health still in spite of the attentive care of my family and the doctor.

My present doctor is a capital fellow, and when he comes to see me he laughs so much at my stories that I always think he ought to take me half price. Instead of that he regards me as an animated laboratory for his interesting chemical experiments; but I had the best of him last time I was laid up, for I made him take a dose of the filthy compound he had ordered for me the previous day.

First he said he wouldn't, then he said he couldn't, but I said what was not poison for the patient could not hurt the physician; and in the end he had to swallow the dose, making far more fuss over its nasty taste than I did. But I noted that he at once wrote me a new prescription, which was as sweet as any advertised syrup, and further, that he arranged his next visit should be just after I finished the bottle.

However, that is years and years after the time of which I am treating.

Yet I am tempted to anticipate, because the mention of Edenburn earlier in this chapter suggests a quaint individual about whom a few observations may be made.

Bill Hogan was our factotum. He was stable-boy, steward, ladies'-maid, and professional busybody, as well as a bit of a character, though he possessed none worth mentioning.

When we were packing up to leave Edenburn, my wife was watching him fill two casks, one with home-made jam, the other with china.

Called away to luncheon, she found on her return both casks securely nailed down.

'Oh, you should not have done that, Bill,' she said, 'for now we shan't know which contains which.'

'I thought of that, ma'am,' replies Bill, 'so I have written S for chiney on the one, and G for jam on the other.'

Bill's orthography was obviously original.

So was the drive he took with a certain cheery guest of mine one Sabbath morning.

The said guest desired more refreshment than he was likely to get at that early hour at Edenburn, so he drove into Tralee, ostensibly to church, and told Bill to have the car round at the club at one.

'Well,' narrated Bill afterwards, 'out came the Captain from the club, having a few drinks taken, and up he got on the car with my help, but at the corner of Denny Street he pulled up at the whisky store, and said we must drink the luck of the road. Well we drank the luck at every house on the way out of the town, and presently in the road down came the mare, pitching the Captain over the hedge, and marking her own knees, as well as breaking the shaft. At last we all got home somehow, and there in the yard was the master, looking us all three up and down as though he were going to commit us all from the Bench. Then a twinkle came into his eye, and he said as mild as a dove to the Captain, "I see by the look of her knees you've been taking the mare to say her prayers."'