'If I do get a headache, I've a head to have it in, not a frame on which to hang an eyeglass.' That is a political amenity on which I will not dwell. Very little money-lending is to be heard of in the south of Ireland, and in all my experience I only remember one case in Kerry. Tenants in Ireland, however, have great horror of breaking bulk, and many of them will do a bill for a neighbour when they have deposits in the bank for themselves. As it is a point of honour never to refuse a friend in this respect, you can easily imagine the amount of 'paper' which is fluttering. Even when a farmer has a tidy sum of money on deposit with the bank at one per cent., if he wants to employ a sum for a short time, say for the purchase of cattle, he prefers to raise the money on a bill at six per cent. That is to say, the bank is lending him his own money at five per cent.--a truly Hibernian trait, which it would be difficult to beat anywhere. A bill for drink is not recoverable, but occasionally an insidious publican will take a man's I.O.U. and sue on that. One applied to me to help him to get the money from a tenant. 'You must show me the account,' said I. As I suspected, there was whisky in it, and I declined on the spot. All drink in Ireland is on cash down terms only. If they gave tick, they would never recover the money, and if every Irishman is a knowing scoundrel, the publican is a trifle more knowledgable than the customer, whose brains are besodden. A man, who had been a servant of mine, started a public near Tralee, and thinking he would get customers from the other whisky stores, he gave tick. His popularity lasted just as long as the tick did, and a week later he was broke. I do not say so much about Tralee being able to support one hundred and sixty liquor shops, because there is a little shipping, but how Cahirciveen can enable fifty publicans to thrive is a melancholy mystery to me. I was animadverting once, at Dingle, on the topic, when one of my labourers remarked:-- 'It's the gentry does the drinking.' 'Now that's very curious,' said I, 'for as there are only two of us, and as I never touch spirits, the other must have such a thirst that he'd consume the bay if only it were made of whisky.' In these democratic days, it is as well to resist any undue aspersion on the upper classes. To pass any aspersion on the bibulous propensities of a tenant of mine named Flaherty would be impossible. When he was buying his farm, I told him the Government ought to take him on very easy terms, when they became his landlords. 'And for why?' he asked. 'Because,' I replied, 'the duty you pay on the whisky you drink is more than twenty times your annual rent.'