The waiter was a delightful Celt.

Upon my asking him whether the house could furnish anything distantly resembling good Irish whisky, he produced a bottle of alleged Scotch whisky, which he put upon the table with a decisive air, exclaiming, "And this, yer honour, is the most excellent whisky in the whole world, or I'm not an Irishman!" Urged by the cold we tempered it with hot water and tasted it.

It shut us up at once to believe the waiter a Calmuck or a Portuguese--anything, in short, but an Irishman.

It is an extraordinary fact that, so far, the whisky I have found at Irish hotels has been uniformly quite execrable.
I am almost tempted to think that the priests sequestrate all the good whisky in order to discourage the public abuse of it, for the "wine of the country" which they offer one is as uniformly excellent.
Kilkenny ought to be and long was a prosperous town.

In 1702, the second Duke of Ormonde made grants (at almost nominal ground-rents) of the ground upon which a large portion of the city of Kilkenny was then standing, or upon which houses have since been built.
These grants have passed from hand to hand, and form the "root of title" of very many owners of house property in Kilkenny.