s. We used to
leave early in the morning for our work on the Curragh, taking with us
the materials for our breakfasts and dinners. As to the cooking, some
went to the canteen, while others got their meals wherever they happened
to be working. As there were plenty of chips and small cuttings of wood,
only fit for that purpose, we used to make of these big fires on the
short grass, and we boiled our water for tea or coffee and our eggs, and
frizzled our chops or bacon at the end of a long stick.

I have mentioned before that whenever one finds work particularly
laborious he is fairly certain to find Irishmen at it. It was so at the
Curragh. When a carpenter or joiner lays down the boarding of a floor,
if there is only a small quantity of it he planes it down himself to
make an even surface. But if there is a large quantity this does not
pay, and the contractor brings in another artist called a "flogger,"
who, in nine cases out of ten, in my time, was an Irishman. It was
generally given out as "piece work" to one man, the "master-flogger," as
you might term him, who employed the others. One of these, a very decent
Irishman, Tom Cassidy, whom I had known in Liverpool, had the contract
for the work at the Curragh Camp, and he had about a score of his
fellow-countrymen working for him.

Going back to Liverpool for a holiday, while my brother and I were still
at the Curragh, honest Tom called on my father and mother, who knew him
well. They were glad to hear that he was lodging at the Widow Walsh's,
and could tell them all about their boys. This he could do most
truthfully without letting his imagination run away with him. "Aye,
indeed," he said, "Barney and John are lodging in the one house with me,
with a decent widow woman, and many a glass we had together at Igoe's."
Tom had put in this bit of "local colouring" about Igoe's to show the
good fellowship between us, but as their sons were both teetotalers,
the old people knew that this could not be true, and the rest of his
story was somewhat discredited in consequence.

Igoe's was a public house just on the corner of the road leading from
the Curragh to Suncroft. What between the workmen at the Camp and the
soldiers and the militia, Igoe's must have been doing a roaring trade at
this time. Which reminds me that I one day saw John O'Connell (son of
the Liberator), then a captain in the Dublin militia, trying to get a
lot of his men, who were the worse for liquor, out of Igo