so until he reached home, miles beyond Westport, the last station on the line. His foot and leg were a dreadful sight, but he had wished not to waste on himself the money earned in harvesting, which he had intended for his wife and children on the other side of Westport. This did not look like wastefulness or extravagance; yet the landlords say the tenants are wasteful, and the landlords are all honourable men. I wished that I had gone through a course of ambulance lectures, and learned something of surgery; but I could do nothing beyond making the man promise to have his leg bandaged at Westport, and presenting him with a fee for the doctor there. He was not even smoking to divert his thoughts from his pain, for tobacco cost money, and that he wanted for his wife; so George gave him a cigar, which puzzled and amused him considerably, as he made vain attempts to smoke it without cutting off the end, his former experiences of smoking not having gone beyond a pipe.

The train stopped at a great many stations, and at every station there were a great many police on the platform, assisting, as far as their presence went, at the arrival and departure of every train. This they always seem to do at the smallest stations

in the most peaceable districts; in fact, they are an all-pervading presence, and no picture of Irish scenery gives at all a correct impression unless the finest house in the foreground is a police barrack and the landscape is well peopled with constables. The only occasions on which they are conspicuous by their absence are those on which the long-suffering peasants retaliate on their oppressors by some dreadful agrarian outrage. With these unfortunate exceptions they may be said to be always on the spot; but as with these identical exceptions Ireland is practically free from crime, it would seem to an outside observer that the large sums spent in maintaining in idleness this army of able-bodied policemen are rather more uselessly wasted than if they were thrown into the sea, where they would not serve to irritate the people against the Government by keeping up a perpetual system of petty tyranny in their midst.

Be this as it may, however, we were carefully scanned by several members of the Royal Irish Constabulary as we alighted from the train at Ballinasloe, and proceeded to order a car to drive over to Loughrea. Indeed, extra vigilance in connection with railway passengers had lately been instilled into their ranks, for there was an exhibition

of Irish manufactures shortly to be opened in Dublin, and no one could tell what desperate characters might be enticed from the country to the capital by an exhibition which was patronised rather by the Land League than by the lawful authorities. So the lawful authorities, by a judicious exercise of their characteristic tact, had issued an order to the police in all the country districts to furnish them with the number, the names, and the political opinions of all persons about to visit Dublin; and hence a specially eager inspection of trains on their part, extending even to those passengers who were outward bound.

Ignorant, however, of the suspicion our appearance was exciting, we ordered some lunch at Ballinasloe (although it was obvious to the police that, if we had been really bent on any honest business, we might have brought it in our pockets from Dublin, and eaten it, without delay, in the train), and while the car was being got ready and the horse fed, we went, under the very noses of the watchful police, to call on Mr. Matthew Harris, then residing in the aforesaid village of Ballinasloe. Now this Mr. Harris was well known to the police as one of the traversers in the famous State trial along with Mr. Parnell and other bad characters

of that description, so that any doubt which the police might at first have had of our object in visiting these dangerous districts was finally dispelled; but, as they had no inspector at hand to direct their movements, they decided that it would be as well to throw all responsibility on the authorities at Loughrea, and accordingly telegraphed the news that a couple of desperate ruffians were coming, and that the Loughrea police must assemble in force and play the men on their arrival.

We, meanwhile, were having a most interesting talk with Mr. Harris, who held strong opinions about the state of the country and the responsibility of the landlords for its disturbed condition. He told us that in our drive of nearly twenty miles to Loughrea we should hardly pass a single house, for grazing was now more profitable to the landlords than agriculture, and they had therefore exterminated the inhabitants in order to add a few pounds to their rents. This had happened more than once in the history of the country, and the culture had been changed from corn to grass, and vice versa, whenever a profit might be expected from the alteration, and without any reference to the rights of the unfortunate tenants.

He was

enthusiastic about the good qualities of the Irish

people, who would make a splendid nation, and he was most anxious that they should think for themselves, and not follow their leaders blindly in anything. As to the charge of idleness, he utterly denied it, and, on the other hand, charged the English with undervaluing intellectual recreation, and admiring nothing but physical capacity for work-a quality in which they were easily surpassed by that patient animal the ass.

We parted on excellent terms, and started on our drive entirely ignorant of the reception which the fates and the police were preparing for us at the other end of our journey. We drove through a rich tract of country, and saw, as had been predicted, scarcely a single house. The district had formerly been full of people, and was now inhabited by sheep. Ruins of houses we occasionally saw, but these had been almost entirely obliterated, and the stones used for the walls which intersect the country. Reddish-brown stains in these stones would sometimes indicate that they had once formed the chimney of a cottage, in which a farmer's family had maintained the peat-fire on the hearth till its smoke had left a lasting mark which the weather had as yet been unable to destroy. Few and far between, we now and then