Excellencies.' We made a sort of passage as these dignitaries
advanced to shake hands with a few of those they knew best. The
Lord Lieutenant then gave his arm to the lady of highest rank (alas,
it was not I!); her Excellency chose her proper squire, and we
passed through the beautifully decorated rooms to St. Patrick's Hall
in a nicely graded procession, magnificence at the head, humility at
the tail. A string band was discoursing sweet music the while, and
I fitted to its measures certain well-known lines descriptive of the
entrance of the beasts into the ark.

'The animals went in two by two,
The elephant and the kangaroo.'

As my escort was a certain brilliant lord justice, and as the
wittiest dean in Leinster was my other neighbour, I almost forgot to
eat in my pleasure and excitement. I told the dean that we had
chosen Scottish ancestors before going to our first great dinner in
Edinburgh, feeling that we should be more in sympathy with the
festivities and more acceptable to our hostess, but that I had
forgotten to provide myself for this occasion, my first function in
Dublin; whereupon the good dean promptly remembered that there was a
Penelope O'Connor, daughter of the King of Connaught. I could not
quite give up Tam o' the Cowgate (Thomas Hamilton) or Jenny Geddes
of fauld-stule fame, also a Hamilton, but I added the King of
Connaught to the list of my chosen forebears with much delight, in
spite of the polite protests of the Rev. Father O'Hogan, who sat
opposite, and who remarked that

'Man for his glory
To ancestry flies,