n its way admirable. Put on and worn
about the room by two singularly stately and graceful ladies, they fell
into lines and folds which recalled the most exquisitely beautiful
statuettes of Tanagra; and all allowance made for the glamour lent them
by these two "daughters of the gods, divinely tall," it was impossible
not to see that no woman could possibly look commonplace and
insignificant in such a garment. Yet Lady de Vesci says that more than
once she has known peasant women, to whom such cloaks had been
presented, cut off the characteristic and useful hood, and trim the
mangled robe with tawdry lace. So it is all over the world! Women who
are models for an artist when they wear some garment indigenous to their
country and appropriate to its conditions, prefer to make guys of
themselves in grotesque travesties of the latest "styles" from London
and Paris and Dublin!

Kilkenny boasts that its streets are paved with marble. It is in fact
limestone, but none the worse for that. The snow did not improve them.
So without going on a pilgrimage to the Kilkenny College, at which
Swift, Congreve, and Farquhar,--an odd concatenation of
celebrities--were more or less educated, we made our way to the Imperial
Hotel for luncheon. The waiter was a delightful Celt. Upon my asking him
whether the house could furnish anything distantly resembling good Irish
whisky, he produced a bottle of alleged Scotch whisky, which he put upon
the table with a decisive air, exclaiming, "And this, yer honour, is the
most excellent whisky in the whole world, or I'm not an Irishman!"

Urged by the cold we tempered it with hot water and tasted it. It shut
us up at once to believe the waiter a Calmuck or a Portuguese--anything,
in short, but an Irishman. It is an extraordinary fact that, so far, the
whisky I have found at Irish hotels has been uniformly quite execrable.
I am almost tempted to think that the priests sequestrate all the good
whisky in order to discourage the public abuse of it, for the "wine of
the country" which they offer one is as uniformly excellent.

Kilkenny ought to be and long was a prosperous town. In 1702, the second
Duke of Ormonde made grants (at almost nominal ground-rents) of the
ground upon which a large portion of the city of Kilkenny was then
standing, or upon which houses have since been built.

These grants have passed from hand to hand, and form the "root of title"
of very many owners of house property in Kilkenny.