The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent | Page 8

mountains
with greyhounds and finders, and he seldom failed to bring home a
brace of hares. He was an innocent man, and inherited the social virtues
of the antient Milesians. He was of a florid complexion, looked
amazingly well for a person of his age and manners of life, for his use
of spirituous liquors was prodigious, a custom that much prevails in
these baronies.'
Indeed, no one who was slightly acquainted with the characteristics of
the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Kerry would suggest that total
abstinence was even to-day their predominant virtue.
It is the fashion to say that it is a good thing to be one of a large family.
From a financial point of view I am quite certain that the reverse is
preferable, and as I was the youngest of nine--two others besides those
I mentioned, James and Anne, coming to early demises--I received as
many kicks and cuffs from my brethren as I did halfpence and affection
from my parents. So, like Thackeray, as a child I sympathised with
Lord MacTurk who wished to cut off the heads of his brethren. Now I
have survived them all, and I fondly regret the sounds of voices that are
still.
But as I sit in my arm-chair and ruminate over the past, which every
old man must do in the intervals of reading the Times, going to the club,
or losing his money by careful attention to speculation, I have the
consolation of remembering that I did as much mischief as any other
child. To be a really good child means that the animal is a prig or
unhealthy. To-day I am fond of all my grandchildren, but the one I like
best is the one which proves himself or herself the naughtiest for the
moment.

This is a hard saying for parents, and not a good precept for the young,
but there is solid truth in it and a bit of common-sense too, for it is best
to get the original sin out in the years of innocence.
CHAPTER III
EDUCATION
Perhaps the biggest wrench in life is going to school. It may not seem
so very much afterwards--as the boy said of the tooth when he looked
at it in the dentist's forceps--but the wrench is really bad.
I learned my letters from my mother, and picked up a few other
smatterings before I had daily lessons from a tutor at Dingle. Strange to
say, a very good classical education could have been obtained there in
the thirties, better, so far as I can estimate, than could have been
expected from a town double the size at the same period in England.
At the age of ten I was sent to Huddard's, then a very sound school in
Dublin. I was well enough taught, not caned enough for my deserts,
though more than sufficed for my feelings, and sufficiently fed, but at
the end of two years I had to leave owing to ill health.
An apothecary, who selfishly recollected that the more medicines I took
the better for him if not for me, converted me into a human receptacle
for his empirical abominations, but another surgeon, who was rather
tardily called in, packed me off to the country.
One of the leading Dublin physicians certified that I had only one lung;
but as the other has served me faithfully for sixty-nine years, I am
rather sceptical as to the accuracy of his diagnosis.
I remember very little about Huddard's, except that it was in Mountjoy
Square, and about a hundred boys were herded there in unsought
proximity. We boarders always fought the town boys, but also had to
cajole them in humiliating ways to smuggle us in contraband articles of
food. The meals at Huddard's were fairly good, no doubt, as school fare
goes, but the sugary stick-jaw stuff for which the soul of a boy longs

was naturally not part of the official bill of fare. The bullying was of a
reasonable nature, or at all events I could hold my own with the best of
them, being indifferent to punishment so long as I could hit out
effectively from the shoulder. One of the ushers, a dwarf of malignant
disposition, was an awful tyrant, and we always had an ardent desire to
tar and feather him, only we did not know how to set about the
operation even if we had ventured to attempt it.
After a happy interval of convalescence at home, I was sent to a smaller
school kept by Mr. Hogg at Limerick. One of the boys there
subsequently became that illustrious ornament of the Bench, Lord
Justice Barry.
He was a very eloquent man, counted so even at the Irish Bar, where a
certain high-flown loquacity is pretty prevalent,