to exactly what is
congenial to them, and if it were not for the thickness of their heads a
good many lives would be lost.

There was a gauger, in a central county in Ireland, killed by a blow on
the head from a stick.

The man who struck him, in his defence, stated:--

'I did not hit him a very hard blow, and why the devil did the
Government make a gauger of a man that had a head no thicker than an
egg-shell?'

Mighty few of the Killorglin folk have egg-shell heads, and the bulk of
these do not come to maturity.

The avowed fact that lunacy is largely on the increase in Ireland has
been pronounced by the committee which sat on the question in Dublin to
be mainly due, not only to excessive drinking, but to the assimilation
of adulterated spirits.

Though the foregoing recipe furnishes a pretty fair example, I certainly
would not wager that it could not be beaten elsewhere in Ireland.

For a long time the priests were entirely apathetic on the subject, but
latterly they are bestirring themselves, and are doing their best to put
down wakes, which simply mean one or more nights of disgusting
intemperance in the immediate vicinity of the corpse.

Keening, by the way, is dying out, and what remains of this curious,
mournful waiting is now almost entirely in the hands of old women who
are experts in the art, and get remunerated not only in drink but also
in cash.

It is, however, possible that when I am deploring the alcoholic
tendencies of the Irishman, that these may be due to his more vegetarian
dietary, and not to any undue natural craving for alcohol. This is borne
out by the fact that no Irishman will willingly drink alone, and that
his potations are in the shops where whisky and porter are sold for
consumption on the premises, or at fairs, markets, weddings, or wakes,
to the diminishing number of which I have just called attention.

The parish priest of Dingle recently stated in court that in a
population of seventeen hundred there were over fifty licensed houses,
and he rightly declared that all dealings in licences should for the
present be only by transfer, and that for five years at least no new
licences should be granted. The argument so often heard against stopping
licences is that then more illicit drinking will ensue, but this does
not convince me that the redundant licences should be renewed.

My remedy would be to increase all renewals of licences to fifty pounds
apiece, and to apply the differ