is a train at one-thirty, it is true, but, unluckily for you, it does not go within a hundred miles of your place of destination. The train you ought to have caught went at ten-thirty, and there is not another one till late at night, while, if it be Saturday, you must wait till Monday morning, because there are practically no Sunday trains in Ireland. Do not imagine for a moment that your Irish waiter has misinformed you with malice aforethought, or out of a desire to lengthen your sojourn in his employer’s hotel; because this is not the case. He is merely an Irishman, and therefore a born blunderer; and he does his best to blunder every time. CHAPTER XVII THE TOURIST The tourist is the curse of Ireland, as he is the curse of most places. When one comes to consider the enormous number of grievances the Irish and their political figure-heads have managed to rake up, one wonders that the tourist should hitherto have escaped. That he constitutes a grievance, and a grievance which affects seriously the main body of the Irish people, can not be doubted. It is quite obvious, to begin with, that the tourist in Ireland is usually of the hated Sassenach race. Irishmen do not tour in their own country as Englishmen do, or as Scotchmen have been known to do. They have too little money for indulgences of that kind, and if money be plentiful they prefer to visit England or America. The Englishman, however, insists on taking a holiday in Ireland sometime in his life, even though it be only on his honeymoon. So that in the more suitable months the country bristles with tourists, and the great majority of them are English. Secondly, the tourist, being English, is always more or less hilarious, supercilious and aggressive, and these are qualities of which the Irish of all people least like a display, at any rate from an Englishman. Time out of mind the English tourist has been the covert _bête noire_ of the Continental peoples on account of these very traits. An Englishman on the Continent, especially if he be a middle-class Englishman, or a very wealthy Englishman, has a knack of divesting himself utterly of the thin veneer of social decency which he manages to maintain at home. Somehow the air of the Continent exhilarates him to all sorts of posturing and ridiculousness. The vulgarian, the Philistine and the snob in him become greatly emphasized. He can shout aloud, and be rude to everybody, because he believes that nobody understands what he is pleased to call his lingo. Besides which the Englishman on the Continent always believes in his private bosom that he is a philanthropist, a sort of circular-touring benevolence, as it were. “Who is it,” he inquires grandiloquently, “that keeps these pore foreigners going? Why, the English, and the English alone. It is we who bring millions of pounds to their starved, tax-burdened countries. It is we who populate their rapacious hotels and make their seasons for them,