It professed to be an hotel, and accommodation for sleeping was to be obtained there; but the well-being of the house depended but little on custom of this class.
Nor need I say much of the kitchen, a graphic description of which would not be pleasing.

Here lived a cook, who, together with Tom the waiter, did all that servants had to do at the Kanturk Hotel.
From this kitchen lumps of beef, mutton chops, and potatoes did occasionally emanate, all perfumed with plenteous onions; as also did fried eggs, with bacon an inch thick, and other culinary messes too horrible to be thought of.

But drinking rather than eating was the staple of this establishment.

Such was the Kanturk Hotel in South Main Street, Cork.
It was on a disagreeable, cold, sloppy, raw, winter evening--an evening drizzling sometimes with rain, and sometimes with sleet--that an elderly man was driven up to the door of the hotel on a one-horse car--or jingle, as such conveniences were then called in the south of Ireland.

He seemed to know the house, for with his outside coat all dripping as it was he went direct to the bar-window, and as Fanny O'Dwyer opened the door he walked into that warm precinct.