Not, of course, with a hole and corner scratch company or local ladies
on the job, witness Mrs C P M'Coy type lend me your valise and I'll post
you the ticket. No, something top notch, an all star Irish caste, the
Tweedy-Flower grand opera company with his own legal consort as leading
lady as a sort of counterblast to the Elster Grimes and Moody-Manners,
perfectly simple matter and he was quite sanguine of success, providing
puffs in the local papers could be managed by some fellow with a bit of
bounce who could pull the indispensable wires and thus combine business
with pleasure. But who? That was the rub. Also, without being actually
positive, it struck him a great field was to be opened up in the line
of opening up new routes to keep pace with the times _apropos_ of the
Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the
_tapis_ in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red
tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A
great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet
the travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i.e.
Brown, Robinson and Co.

It was a subject of regret and absurd as well on the face of it and no
small blame to our vaunted society that the man in the street, when the
system really needed toning up, for the matter of a couple of paltry
pounds was debarred from seeing more of the world they lived in instead
of being always and ever cooped up since my old stick-in-the-mud took me
for a wife. After all, hang it, they had their eleven and more humdrum
months of it and merited a radical change of _venue_ after the grind
of city life in the summertime for choice when dame Nature is at her
spectacular best constituting nothing short of a new lease of life.
There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home
island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora
of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around
Dublin and its picturesque environs even, Poulaphouca to which there was
a steamtram, but also farther away from the madding crowd in Wicklow,
rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for elderly
wheelmen so long as it didn't come down, and in the wilds of Donegal
where if report spoke true the _coup d'oeil_ was exceedingly grand
though the lastnamed locality was not easily getatable so that the
influx of visitors was not as yet all