CHAPTER VIII.
In Connaught the upper middle classes, clergy, doctors, lawyers, police officers, bank officials, and so forth, are all strangers in the land.
Each of them looks forward to a promotion which will enable him to move to some more congenial part of Ireland.

A Dublin suburb is the ideal residence; failing that, the next best thing is a country town within easy reach of the metropolis.

Most of them sooner or later achieve a promotion, but some of them are so unfortunate as to die in their exile.
In either case their furniture and effects are auctioned.

No one ever removes his goods from Con-naught, because the cost of getting things to any other part of Ireland is exorbitant, and also because tables and chairs fetch very high prices at auctions.

Thus it happens that a certain historic interest attaches to the furniture of most middle-class houses west of the Shannon.