There was a wonderful chandelier in the hotel dining-room. Fine bronze it was made of, with mermaids, and Tritons, and dolphins flourishing their tails up towards the dingy ceiling-paper, and beaked galleys, on whose prows sat six small lamps, with white china receptacles for paraffin, and smoky brown chimneys. Gone were the brave days when each prow had borne a galaxy of tall wax candles; the chandelier might consider itself lucky in that it had even the paraffin lamps to justify its existence, and that it still hung from a ceiling, instead of sharing the last resting-place of its twin brother, in the bed of the tidal river under the hotel windows. James, the hotel waiter, knew the family history of the chandelier, as he knew that of most people and things in the county. I commented upon it to a young gentleman with a pointed beard, who sat next to me at dinner, and said that it looked to me like Renaissance. The young gentleman suggested, alternatively, that it looked more like bronze. I did not dispute the point, but I think he found the subject precarious, as he turned to the young lady on his left, and I heard him embark upon a new theme. [Illustration: James.] "I was half dead with the toothache all day," he observed. The young lady replied sympathetically that toothache was a fright. "Well, indeed, that's true," said James, smoothly entering the conversation from behind my chair. "I got my own share of it. Sure there was one time I used to be roaring like a Banshee all night with it." "Were you so?" said the gentleman, with a wink at me. "That must have been a long time ago, James." "Well, indeed, it is too, Doctor," replied James meditatively, "going on forty years, I daresay. I went to Dublin, and I went to a great dentist that was in it that time, and he pulled all the teeth I had, and he gave me a new set entirely." "Oh, my!" said the young lady, "that must have been very expensive." "It was so," said James, not without pride. "Twenty pounds I gave him." "That was awful," said the young lady, feelingly; "it was well to be you that had it to spend." "Well, it wasn't all out so bad," said James; "sure I only wore them a few times--I wouldn't be bothered with them, and a doctor that was a friend of mine gave me ten pounds for them." "I suppose they were a fit for a patient of his?" said the doctor.