are
as clear in my mind as if I had seen them yesterday. Amongst them is
some old grey stone bridge near Limerick, where the train slowed down
and my Irish companion--Limerick born and bred, and rejoicing to show
his own country to a landscape lover--declared that he had travelled
almost dry-shod over the backs of the salmon which once thronged along
that river. I had my doubts at the moment as to the literal truth of
this statement, and I am not quite sure that I do not nurse them still.
Anyhow, the country struck me with that deceptive sense of fruitfulness
which besets every Englishman on his first travels into the fertile
districts of Ireland; and partly, perhaps, because I was half a Celt to
begin with, the "wearing of the green" became then and there a symbol in
my mind.

Finally, at the end of a fairly long day's run--for the cheaper kind of
train travelled slowly in those days--the convoying sergeant and I were
dumped down at the station at Cahir, which had not yet become celebrated
in that gorgeous fiction which was woven about it in later years by
the claimant to the Tichborne estates. Night was falling as we tramped
through the village, and on the road beyond we came across the ghostly
shell of an old castle, standing, I think, in the Byrne demesne, which
was packed full of jackdaws, who had caught one or two human phrases
from some half-Christianised member of their fellowship, and who woke
the echoes in answer to our footsteps with a hundred semi-human cries.
They had only a phrase or two amongst them, but they gave one clearly
the impression that they represented a Babylonian crowd intent on
insurrection.

I was passed from one sergeant to another in the course of my transfer
from St George's Barracks to Clare in the county Tipperary, and there
was not one of them who did not try to induce me to change a reputable
garb for a set of garments that would have done justice to a scare-crow.

The contingent with which I was shipped from Bristol to Cork composed
as ribald and foul-mouthed a crew as I remember to have seen, and long
before I assumed Her Majesty's uniform, I was sickened of the enterprise
on which I had embarked. I think I am justified in saying that I was
instrumental in bringing about one great and much needed reform. In
those days, the recruit on enlistment was supposed to receive a
bounty and a free kit; as the thing was worked out by the regimental
quartermaster, he never saw one or the ot