as we had gathered that we were fated to do during the
morning's ceremonies at Dublin Castle.

The Viceregal Lodge is a large, unpretentious, but most comfortable
house, standing in really beautiful grounds. The 160 acres of its
enclosure have been laid out with such skill as to appear to the eye
double or treble the extent they actually are. The great attraction to
my brother and me lay in a tract of some ten acres of woodland which
had been allowed to run entirely wild. We soon peopled this very
satisfactorily with two tribes of Red Indians, two bands of peculiarly
bloodthirsty robbers, a sufficiency of bears, lions and tigers, and an
appalling man-eating dragon. I fear that in view of the size of the
little wood, these imported inhabitants must have had rather cramped
quarters.

The enacting of the role of a Red Indian "brave" was necessarily a
little fatiguing, for according to Fenimore Cooper, our guide in these
matters, it was essential to keep up an uninterrupted series of
guttural grunts of "Ug! Ug!" the invariable manner in which his
"braves" prefaced their remarks.

There was perhaps little need for the imaginary menagerie, for the
Dublin Zoological Gardens adjoined the "Lodge" grounds, and were
accessible to us at any time with a private key. The Dublin Zoo had
always been very successful in breeding lions, and derived a large
amount of their income from the sale of the cubs. They consequently
kept a number of lions, and the roaring of these lions at night was
very audible at the Viceregal Lodge, only a quarter of a mile away.
When I told the boys at school, with perfect truth, that in Dublin I
was nightly lulled to sleep by the gentle roaring of lions round my
couch, I was called a young liar.

There is a pretty lake inside the Viceregal grounds. My two elder
brothers were certain that they had seen wild duck on this lake in the
early morning, so getting up in the dusk of a December morning, they
crept down to the lake with their guns. With the first gleam of dawn,
they saw that there were plenty of wild fowl on the water, and they
succeeded in shooting three or four of them. When daylight came, they
retrieved them with a boat, but were dismayed at finding that these
birds were neither mallards, nor porchards, nor any known form of
British duck; their colouring, too, seemed strangely brilliant. Then
they remembered the neighbouring Zoo, with its ornamental ponds covered
with rare imported and exotic wa