work in machinery. He took out patents for all sorts of ingenious
contrivances, but always lost money. His favorite invention was of a
"railway chair", for joining the ends of rails together, and in the
ultimate success of this he believed to his death. It was (and is) used
on several lines, and was found to answer splendidly, but the old man
never derived any profit from his invention. The fact was he had no
money, and those who had took it up and utilised it, and kept all the
profit for themselves. There were several cases in which his patents
dropped, and then others took up his inventions, and made a commercial
success thereof.

A strange man altogether was that grandfather of mine, whom I can only
remember as a grand-looking old man, with snow-white hair and piercing
hawk's eyes. The merriest of wild Irishmen was he in his youth, and I
have often wished that his biography had been written, if only as a
picture of Dublin society at the time. He had an exquisite voice, and one
night he and some of his wild comrades went out singing through the
streets as beggars. Pennies, sixpences, shillings, and even half-crowns
came showering down in recompense of street music of such unusual
excellence; then the young scamps, ashamed of their gains, poured them
all into the hat of a cripple they met, who must have thought that all
the blessed saints were out that night in the Irish capital. On another
occasion he went to the wake of an old woman who had been bent nearly
double by rheumatism, and had been duly "laid out", and tied down firmly,
so as to keep the body straight in the recumbent position. He hid under
the bed, and when the whisky was flowing freely, and the orgie was at its
height, he cut the ropes with a sharp knife, and the old woman suddenly
sat up in bed, frightening the revellers out of their wits, and, luckily
for my grandfather, out of the room. Many such tales would he tell, with
quaint Irish humor, in his later days. He died, from a third stroke of