There were plenty of games at Thomastown, but no gamesters, for the only restriction we hear of in the place refers, wisely enough, to gambling. It was the sportsman’s paradise. There were two billiard tables and a bowling green; fishing-tackle of all kinds and various guns; a pack of buckhounds, another of foxhounds, and yet another of harriers, and twenty hunters in the stable for the use of those guests who had not their own. We hear nothing of a library, but perhaps because it is taken for granted. I hope so. Mathew, I am certain, was no Squire Western, but a man given not to devouring books, but at least to delicate bouts of reading; no student or ‘wit,’ but one, as the fashion then was, with a gentlemanly taste for letters. I like to think that there was a library, perhaps immediately above the coffee-house, where one could range among the tall folios and now and then come upon a ‘kind-hearted play-book,’ and also have the pleasure of taking down one or two things strange to one, new books, something by Crébillon or Le Sage, Prior’s poems or the brand-new work by Mr. Pope, _The Rape of the Lock_. Nor do we hear anything of music, but this, too, we may surely take for granted. In all this changing company of Irish gentlemen there must have been more than a few musicians, and somewhere on the premises a clavichord or spinet and a viol or two for them to play. One would like to think that a select company, before adjourning to the ‘tavern’ after supper, could listen to something in the strain of _Stay, Shepherd_ or _Whither runneth my Sweetheart?_ a song by Dr. Blow or something from one of Mr. Purcell’s operas, and perhaps even a sonata by Corelli or one of Couperin’s suites, which had once set our host Mathew tapping his feet when he was in France. These are perhaps idle fancies, but we are not to be denied them, and they are not too idle to complete the picture.