by touches of poetic feeling, which give finish to the good sense and quiet humour of the writing.

The following is a skilful picture of a typical Hibernian peasant and his belongings:

'Paddy Shiel, our "odd," or, as such necessary evils are called in Mayo, our "out-door man," was about as perfect a specimen of his class and country as could well be imagined-spare and rawboned, and wearing a costume which, since the famine, had become rare; namely, the blue "tail" coat, ornamented at somewhat distant intervals with tarnished brass buttons, and the wondrous breeches (probably heirlooms in the family), open at the knees, and surmounting home-made woollen stockings, which, in the sporting sketches appended to old-world Irish tales, represented the typical Hibernian peasant of the day. Paddy had the misfortune to be a widower, but his wife, before setting forth-which she had done about three months previously-for the bourn from which she was Dever to return, had taken care to fill to overflowing, with helpless human creatures, the wretched cabin in the "village beyant," which to them, poor souls, was "home." The eldest born of Paddy's numerous progeny was a girl-a tall, good-looking and, as yet, bone-displaying damsel of sixteen, with masses of magnificent but totally unkempt auburn hair, and the whitest teeth that I ever saw in human mouth. Not an atom of vanity, nor, indeed, as far as I could discover, of any other feeling, did this handsome young creature possess. Indolent was she to a degree that I never remember to have seen equalled, nor could I, in the very slightest degree, make her understand that, her mother being dead, the care of her young brothers and sisters naturally devolved upon her.

Well do I remember the day when duty led me to pay a visit (it was my first initiation into the mysteries of Irish humble life) to Paddy's cabin. On my entrance, the smoke from the turf fire, while it produced, together with odours (whence proceeding I then knew not), such an agglomeration of unpleasant smells as never before had offended my nostrils, prevented me at first from seeing whether the wretched room, called by courtesy the kitchen, was, or was not, occupied by human beings. There was but little light save that which entered from the open door. The one window was not made to open, and consisted of four panes of glass, brown with the dirt of years, each pane being about six inches

square. It was capable of affording neither light nor ventilation; nevertheless, by dint of opening the door to its utmost width, I did at last (my eyes having become accustomed to the smoke and darkness) perceive, in the centre of the room, a wooden cradle; and also it speedily became apparent to me that in that cradle there lay a child, for a whimpering cry suddenly saluted my ears -a cry very opportune, seeing that I was only just in time to prevent a big, and doubtless extremely hungry, cock from making a carnivorous meal of the helpless infant's eyes. Perched upon the baby's head, the bird, with its rapacious beak, had already made predatory onslaught, when I suddenly appeared on the scene of action, and drove it, cackling and fluttering, to its stronghold in the family bed-place.

"Arrah now, bad cess to it for a bird!" was Biddy's sole remark when I told her what I had witnessed; and, judging from the coolness with which she listened to my description, I should not have been surprised to hear that the pecking out, by a domestic fowl, of a baby's eyes was an event of frequent occurrence in the village.'

After giving an interesting description of a visit she received from the renowned John of Tuam and seven of his priests, who came to inspect a school which she had opened for the benefit of the children of the neighbourhood, and from which, because there were no emblems'images of the Virgin, crucifixes and such things-the Romanist children were now to be excluded, Mrs. Houstoun gives the following characteristic account of a 'station' and one of its clerical heroes:

'It was about a week after the Archbishop's visit that one of his clergy, "Father Pat," alias Priest C-—, got"honest man (as the Scotch say)-into grief" at Bundoragha. He had been holding, in company with another priest, a "station" in that interesting village-a "station" being (as I may, for the information of the uninitiated, state) neither more nor less than an opportunity for the confession by the peasantry of their sins. These recognised occasions for putting money into the priests' pockets occurred, on an average, three or four times a year, and were always held in the cabin of the "best-to-do" of the flock whose sins the Father was ready, after confession and the due payment of fees, to remit. The expense attending these stations was con

siderable, and fell entirely on the favoured individual whom the Fathers honoured with their company. As a matter of course there was provided for their regalement a goose, as pièce de résistance, and whisky ad libitum. Should the weather prove unfavourable for "Father Pat's return after dark along the dangerous bridle-path to Louisberg, he and his pony were housed for the night in the abode where the station had to be held.

'On the occasion to which I refer, the weather had been throughout the day more than usually stormy, and therefore no surprise was felt at the absence on the road of any sounds that were indicative of the return of the two priests, the echo of whose ponies' galloping hoofs could usually be heard from the Lodge as they rattled away beneath the windows. It was not till the following morning that the absence of the accustomed sounds was accounted for. "Father Pat" (as a "boy" from Bundoragha arrived in hot haste to say) had been taken ill in the night, and was now "lying stretched" at Devanney's (our head-boatman's) cabin, and "destroyed entirely with a pain insoide of him." Under these circumstances, and considering the sex and vocation of the sufferer, it was "the Captain," and he only, who could venture to prescribe for the invalid's malady. A sick priest, with a bad pain "insoide of him," was clearly beyond my personal superintendence; so I contented myself with despatching some simple remedies, such as chlorodyne, brandy and calomel, to the cabin in which the patient lay. As matters turned out, I might have spared myself the trouble of sending more than one specific out of the five, i.e., brandy. "A hair of the dog that had bitten him" was all that "Father Pat," who had been "glorious" the night before, required! As he lay, writhing with pain, on Peter Devanney's bed (two priests had occupied this uninviting-looking couch conjointly), he faintly implored his visitor to give him, "in the name of a dhrop of the crathur."

'It was the same priest who, on a later occasion of a similar kind, paid us a visit at the Lodge, and made a singular return for the hospitality and kindness which he received. The ostensible object of his call was to ask for a contribution for a new church which was about to be built at Louisberg, but after obtaining even a larger cheque than he had ventured to hope for, he said insinuatingly, and whilst casting piteous glances at the window, against the panes of which the wild south-west wind was driving perfect sheets of rain: "Bedad, and it ain't weather for a Christian to be

out in, at all. Ye don't happen, whisper now, Captain, to have a spare flask with a dhrop o' spirits in it, to keep the cauld out, for I'm fairly moidhered wid the wetting I got on the road as I came along." There was no resisting this appeal. The weather certainly was frightful, and Father Pat, although a rather decided inebriate, was an old man, and scarcely possessed bodily strength enough to dare the dangers of such a mountain path as the one which lay before him.... Very much à contre cœur was an invitation to remain the night given to the priest, and right glad were we when (the said invitation having been declined) he-mounting his sure-footed little Connemara pony-went his way, a soda-bottle full of good whisky in his pocket, and "lashings" of thanks upon his lips.

'Will it be believed that on the Sunday but one that followed,...this Louisberg priest fulminated from the altar against us, and likewise caused to be published, in the local Roman Catholic papers, the most bitter and the most inciting denunciations to murder? The "Scotch adventurer" was to be "smashed up," his people and he, who were robbers of "the countryman's home," were to be desthroyed entirely, and his "flocks and herds" were to be "got rid' of, so that "God's human creatures might have their rights again."

The following extract will serve as a sample of the felicity with which Mrs. Houstoun depicts natural scenery:

The distance from Westport to the "Lake whose gloomy shore Skylark never warbled o'er,"and at the foot of whose "rocks so high and steep" the gray sandstone walls"undressed," to use a mason's term-of the intensely ugly house, had lately been surmounted with a roof,-is about twenty English miles, the last half of the journey lying directly through the heart of the mountains. The day was, for a wonder, fine; and our equipage, including a pair of spirited mares we drove, was the same which has been already mentioned on the occasion of the election day. But not, as then, were we prepared, either in mind or firearms, for any encounter with a foe. The object of the drive was a thoroughly peaceful one, nor had we at that time become so imbued with the conviction that the name of our enemies was Legion, and therefore that precautions (as a matter of course) ought never to have been neglected. On we sped-past the squalid town with

its numberless beggars; its "objects" vieing in loathsomeness with those which in small Italian towns are apt to crowd round a stranger's carriage -past the pretty wood yclept "Brackloon," wherein self-sown holly-trees galore, and, in the winter season, the "wily woodcock" do abound, and parallel with whose ivyclothed, gray walls there frets and foams the loveliest of small rivers-a river, the banks of which are thickly fringed with giant specimens of the beautiful Osmunda regalis, whose fronds dip in the rapid current, las, dashing over rocks and boulders, the "Brackloon" winds its restless way toward the sea.'

But the chief interest of Mrs. Houstoun's work lies in the light which it casts upon the causes of the miserable social condition of the people. Foremost amongst the causes of these evils she places the system of Absenteeism, with its associated injustice to the tenantry. Upon this subject she remarks:

'In the county of Mayo, one of the most extensive in Ireland, the proportion of landowners who...live away from, and spend their income out of, the country is very large. "Is it absentees you mane?" an Irishman is known once to have said: "Shure we've lashings of 'em [Anglicè, "lots of them"] between this and Dublin"; and, laugh as we may at the blunder, who that has ever witnessed the results of the fact can think of it without regret? During the long years which I, an Englishwoman, and a stranger, wearily passed in a land which so many wealthy Irishmen avoid as they would one plague-stricken, I can safely enunciate my belief, that in the no inconsiderable portion of it which came under my notice, very few landlords practically evinced the slightest inclination to sojourn on their estates. Those of the number who cared for "sport" might, during the shooting season, spend a few weeks on the mountains or in the woods; and "business"-that is, the overhauling an agent's accounts, and such-like important matters did, at certain seasons of the year, draw from their more agreeable homes elsewhere the owners of the soil; bat-and, alas! for the neglected people, for whose well-being they were, and are, to a large extent, answerable-no sense of daty, and no willingness of self-sacrifice, prompted the expenditure in the country of the money they derive from it, which alone could effectually benefit that country.'

To this absenteeism our author attributes the extinction of the feudal feeling which has now rendered residence in many parts of Ireland so undesirable and dangerous. She says:

'Time was, and that not very long ago, when in no people on earth was the feeling of feudal attachment so strong and so devoted......At the time when we made our entrée on the scene, the hereditary respect and devotion of the tenantry to the "ould family" was not as yet totally extinguished, and, as regarded the scion of the race who had lately succeeded to his kingdom, "Long may he reign!" was an exclamation of hopeful goodwill, which I more than once heard enunciated by men who, themselves reduced to bitter poverty, had not forgotten that they and their forefathers had lived on "his lordship's" land for generations, and had never been behindhand with the "rint." But warm as a heart may be, and loyal with hereditary trust as well,.....when a ruler, be he king or landlord, persistently hides in distant lands his face from those who would gladly sun themselves in the light of a countenance which has hereditary claims on their affection-when the "prayer," he who by the sweat of his brow earns wherewith to swell the income to be paid, rarely, if ever, comes in contact with the liege lord, can we wonder (especially in days such as ours)......that feudal sentiment should have gradually become extinct?'

On the question whether the disaffection of the people to the landlords is fostered by the priests, our authoress thus expresses herself:

'The bitter animosity of the priesthood against the landlords can be better understood when we remember that from the hard earnings of the peasantry are wrung the doles which the clergy claim as their due. It is hard for a man whose family is "long and wake" as his means are short, and the will of his priest strong and masterful, to pay his rent and to feed and clothe himself and his belongings; but, however difficult poor Paddy may find it to make both ends meet, believe me that the last to suffer from his chronic impecuniosity will be the Father-Flanagan, Kelly or Bourke-who holds in his hands (according to the fixed belief of these benighted people) the power to bind and to unloose, to doom to eternal tortures or make happy for ever, the souls of his

'More than once,' says Mrs. Houstoun, as we, to use a West country phrase, "could hear," there had been "divisions in the camp," the innocent declaring with loud voice that they would no longer suffer for the guilty; but when these dissensions reached the "clairgy's" ears, they invariably put a "stopper" on the impending movement. "Now, boys, I'll have no quarrelling," was the sum and substance of the parish priest's after-chapel discourse to his obedient flock; and well did the latter both comprehend and obey the orders thus cabalistically given. To threaten, in cases of contumacy, those poor ignorant "dumb dogs" would have been a work of supererogation. Disobedience to the priest's commands is too well recognised as a mortal sin (one to be followed by refusal to "anoint," and by sundry other pains and penalties terrible in proportion to their vagueness), for the tyrannized-over congregation even to dream of offering resistance. Father Mick, a butcher's son maybe, and probably as good a judge of a horse as was to be found "between this and Daublin," had commanded his flock to put a bridle on their lips, and therefore, without comment or resistance, the people

remained mute as before, on the subject of the murder.'

6

After our author received a notification, written on coarse paper, directed to 'Lady Houstoun, Esquire,' and containing a promise from 'Rory of the Hills,' that if she would 'lave the counthry entirely, no harrum in life would happen' to her, ' a coarseminded Roman Catholic curate' said to her: Had it not been for us, the Captain would have been shot years ago.' And the morality of the priests admits of their playing with the life, as it does with the property, of the heretic. In a little book, published by authority of Cardinal Cullen, entitled What Every Christian ought to Know, the teaching is: If you steal a little, the sin is a venial one; but if you steal a little from several persons, so that the whole amounts to a good deal, the sin is a mortal one.' And in an early edition of the same catechism, which has since, however, been suppressed, there was the startling enunciation: To steal from a heretic is no sin at all'!

It is easier to see where the evils are by which Ireland is afflicted than to remedy them. As the removal of the Court of the Roman Emperors to Constantinople gave the Pope the opportunity to increase his influence in Rome, so have the priests in Ireland gained influence through the non-residence of the landlords. Common-sense says that the policy by which an evil has been aggravated, if not produced, should be reversed. Good citizens will pray that the spirit of wisdom may guide our statesmen in dealing with a matter of such moment as that which ís now so yiolently thrust upon their attention.