By the time that the commercial traveller had calmly finished a hearty
meal there was nearly a riot, and then he emerged from the coffee-room,
and suggested that the waiter had better look in the teapot.

By the way, I don't fancy that he regularly travelled on that road, for
he would have been a marked man at Naas for years to come.

I was seventeen at the time when I had decided, with parental
acquiescence, to be a farmer, and I was sent to learn my profession to
the south of Scotland, to a farmer named Bogue.

I there acquired, at all events, one curious fact, which has stuck in my
head ever since, and it is thus:--

Scotland and Ireland are governed by the same Sovereign, Lords, and
Commons. Scotland is the best farmed country in Europe, and Ireland
about the worst.

One pair of horses in Scotland were then supposed to cultivate fifty
acres of tillage, and in Ireland the average was one horse to five
acres. Indeed it is in both cases much the same to-day.

In reality a farm is a workshop from which you turn out as much produce
as possible. But on an Irish farm it is the habit to squeeze out the
last possible ounce without putting anything in, for it is not run with
an eye on future years, but only in a hand-to-mouth, beggar-the-soil
kind of way, without a thought beyond contemporary exigencies.

There were several other pupils with Bogue, but I stuck to the business