my search for a
career. Big posts were in due time going for engineers; and those young
men who had the stamp of apprenticeship to, or association with, the
great man could get almost anything in the days of the fever for railway
construction.

Even later than the period I am now recalling, the journey from Dublin
to Dingle would take more than two days, and, so far as I can recollect,
it certainly took five from Dingle to London. Those coaching journeys
were terrible experiences in wet weather, for you were drenched outside
and suffocated inside, whilst you paid more than three times the present
railway fare for the miserable privilege of this uncomfortable means of
transit.

The old posting hotels used to be uncommonly good and comfortable,
whilst they did a thriving trade. The coach purported to give you ample
time to breakfast and dine at certain capital hostels, but by a private
arrangement between mine host and the guard and driver, the meals used
to be abruptly closured in order to save the landlord's larder.

On the way down from Dublin, a thirty minutes' pause was allowed at Naas
for breakfast; but on the occasion of my story, as well as on every
other, after a quarter of an hour the waiter announced the coach was
just starting.

Everybody ran out to regain their seats, except one commercial
traveller, who picked up all the teaspoons and put them in the teapot
before calmly resuming his meal.

Back came the waiter with:--

'Not a moment to spare, sir.'

'All right,' said the traveller; 'which of the passengers has taken the
teaspoons?'

The waiter gave one glance of horror, and then proceeded to have every
one on the coach examined for the missing articles.

By the time that the commercial traveller had calmly finished a hearty
meal there was nearly a riot, and then he emerged from the coffee-room,
and suggested that the waiter had better look in the teapot.

By the way, I don't fancy that he regularly travelled on that road, for
he would have been a marked man at Naas for years to come.

I was seventeen at the time when I had decided, with parental
acquiescence, to be a farmer, and I was sent to learn my profession to
the south of Scotland, to a farmer named Bogue.

I there acquired, at all events, one curious fact, which has stuck in my
head ever since, and it is thus:--

Scotland and Ireland are governed by the same Sovereign, Lords, and
Commons. Scotland is the best farmed country in Europe