SION HOUSE, COUNTY TYRONE, Fed. Hearing nothing from Mr. Davitt yesterday, I gave up the idea of attending the Ripon-Morley meeting last night. As I have come to Ireland to hear what people living in Ireland have to say about Irish affairs, I see no particular advantage in listening to imported eloquence on the subject, even from so clever a man as his books prove Mr. Morley to be, and from so conscientious a man as an acquaintance, going back to the days when he sat with Kingsley at the feet of Maurice, makes me believe Lord Ripon to be. How much either of them knows about Ireland is another matter. A sarcastic Nationalist acquaintance of mine, with whom I conversed about the visitors yesterday, assured me it had been arranged that Lord Ripon should wear the Star of the Garter, “so the people might know him from Morley.” When I observed that Dublin must have a short memory to forget so soon the face of a Chief Secretary, he replied: “Forget his face? Why, they never saw his face! It’s little enough he was here, and indoors he kept when here he was. He shook hands last night with more Irishmen than ever he spoke to while he was Chief Secretary; for he used to say then, I am told, in the Reform Club, that the only way to get along with the Irish was to have nothing to do with them!”

There was a sharp discussion, I was told, in the private councils of the Committee yesterday as to whether the Queen should be “boycotted,” and the loyal sentiments usual in connection with her Majesty’s name dropped from the proceedings. I believe it was finally settled that this might put the guests into an awkward position, both of them having worn her Majesty’s uniform of State as public servants of the Crown.

During the day I walked through many of the worst quarters of Dublin. I met fewer beggars in proportion than one encounters in such parts of London as South Kensington and other residential regions not over-frequented by the perambulating policemen; but I was struck by the number of persons and particularly of women who wore that most pathetic of all the liveries of distress, “the look of having seen better days.” In the most wretched streets I traversed there was more squalor than suffering the dirtiest and most ragged people in them showing no signs of starvation, or even of insufficient rations; and certainly in the most dismal alleys and by-streets, I came upon nothing so revolting as the hives of crowded misery which make certain of the tenement house quarters of New York more gruesome than the Cour des Miracles itself used to be.

This morning at 7.25 A.M. I left Dublin with Lord Ernest Hamilton for Strabane. My attention was distracted from the reports of the great meeting by the varied and picturesque beauty of the landscape, through which we ran at a very respectable rate in a very comfortable carriage. We passed Dundalk, where Edward Bruce got himself crowned king of Ireland, after his brother Robert had won a throne in Scotland.

These masterful Normans, all over Europe from Apulia to Britain, worked out the problem of “satisfied nationalities” much more successfully and simply than Napoleon III. in our own day. If Edward Bruce broke down where Robert succeeded, the causes of his failure may perhaps be worth considering even now by people who have set themselves the task in our times of establishing “an Irish nationality.” Leaving out the Cromwellian English of Tipperary and the South, and the Scotch who have done for Ulster, what he aimed at for all Ireland, they have very much the same materials to deal with as those which he dismally failed to fashion.

Drogheda stands beautifully in a deep valley through which flows the Boyne Water, spanned by one of the finest viaducts in Europe. Here, two years after the discovery of America, Poyning’s Parliament enacted that all laws passed in Ireland must be subject to approval by the English Privy Council. I wonder nobody has proposed a modification of this form of Home Rule for Ireland now. Earl Grey’s recent suggestion that Parliamentary government be suspended for ten years in Ireland, which I heard warmly applauded by some able lawyers and business men in Dublin, involves like this an elimination of the Westminster debates from the problem of government in Ireland. As we passed Drogheda, Father Burke’s magnificent presence and thrilling voice came back to me out of the mist of years, describing with an indignant pathos, never to be forgotten, the fearful scenes which followed the surrender of Sir Arthur Ashton’s garrison, when “for the glory of God,” and “to prevent the further effusion of blood,” Oliver ordered all the officers to be knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped as slaves to the Barbadoes. But how different was the spirit in which the great Dominican recalled these events from that in which the “popular orators,” scattering firebrands and death, delight to dwell upon them!

At Strabane station we found a handsome outside car waiting on us, and drove off briskly for this charming place, the home of one of the most active and prosperous manufacturers in Ireland. A little more than half way between the station and Sion House, Mr. Herdman met us afoot. We jumped off and walked up with him. Sion House, built for him by his brother, an accomplished architect, is a handsome Queen Anne mansion. It stands on a fine knoll, commanding lovely views on all sides. Below it, and beyond a little stream, rise the extensive flax-mills which are the life of the place, under the eye and within touch of the hand of the master. These works were established here by Mr. Herdman’s father, after he had made a vain attempt to establish them at Ballyshannon in Donegal, half a century ago. As all salmon fishers know, the water-power is admirable at Ballyshannon, where the Erne pours in torrents down a thirty feet fall. But the ignorance and indolence of the people made Ballyshannon quite impossible, with this result, that while the Erne still flows unvexed to the sea, and the people of Ballyshannon live very much as they lived in 1835, here at Sion the Mourne enables 1100 Irish operatives to work up L90,000 worth of Irish flax every year into yarn for the Continent, and to divide among themselves some L20,000 a year in wages.

After luncheon we walked with Mr. Herdman through the mills and the model village which has grown up around them. Everywhere we found order, neatness, and thrift. The operatives are almost all people of the country, Catholics and Protestants in almost equal numbers. “I find it wise,” said Mr. Herdman, “to give neither religion a preponderance, and to hold my people of both religions to a common standard of fidelity and efficiency.” The greatest difficulty he has had to contend with is the ineradicable objection of some of the peasantry to continuous industry. He told us of a strapping lass of eighteen who came to the mills, but very soon gave up and went back to the parental shebeen in the mountains rather than get up early in the morning to earn fourteen shillings a week.

Three weeks of her work would have paid the year’s rent of the paternal holding.

In the village, which is regularly laid out, is a reading-room for the workpeople. There are cricket clubs, and one of the mill buildings (just now crammed with bales of flax) has been fitted up by Mr. Herdman as a theatre. There is a drop-curtain representing the Lake of Como, and the flies are flanked by life-size copies in plaster of the Apollo Belvidere and the Medicean Venus. This is a development I had hardly looked to see in Ulster.

After we had gone over the works thoroughly, Mr. Herdman took us back, on a transparent pretext of enlightened curiosity touching certain qualities of spun flax, to give us a glimpse of the “beauty of Sion” a well-grown graceful girl of fifteen or sixteen summers. She concentrated her attention, as soon as we appeared, upon certain mysterious bobbins and spindles, with an exaggerated determination which proved how completely she saw through our futile and frivolous devices. Mr. Herdman told us, as we came away discomfited, a droll story of the ugliest girl ever employed here a girl so preternaturally ugly that one of his best blacksmiths having been entrapped into offering to marry her, lost heart of grace on the eve of the sacrifice, and, taking ship at Derry for America, fled from Sion for ever.

In the evening came, with other guests, Dr. Webb, Q.C., Regius Professor of Laws and Public Orator of Trinity at Dublin, well known both as a Grecian capable of composing “skits” as clever as the verses yclept Homerstotle in which the Saturday Review served up the Donnelly nonsense about Bacon and Shakespeare and as a translator of Faust. He was abused by the Loyalists at Dublin, in 1884, for his defence of P.N. Fitzgerald, the leader who beat Parnell and Archbishop Croke so badly at Thurles the other day; and he is in a fair way now to be denounced with equal fervour by the Nationalists as a County Court judge in Donegal. He finds this post no sinecure. “I do as much work in five days,” he said to-night, “as the Superior Judges do in five weeks.”

He is a staunch Unionist, and laughs at the notion that the Irish people care one straw for a Parliament in Dublin. “Why should they?” he said. “What did any Parliament in Dublin ever do to gratify the one real passion of the Irish peasant his hunger for a bit of land? So far as the Irish people are concerned, Home Rule means simply agrarian reform. Would they get that from a Parliament in Dublin? If the British Parliament evicts the landlords and makes the tenants lords of the land, they will be face to face with Davitt’s demand for the nationalising of the land. Do you suppose they will like to see the lawyers and the politicians organising a labour agitation against the ‘strong farmers’? The last thing they want is a Parliament in Dublin. Lord Ashbourne’s Act carries in its principle the death-warrant of the ‘National League.’”

Some excellent stories were told in the picturesque smoking-room after dinner, one of a clever and humorous, sensible and non-political priest, who, being taken to task by some of his brethren for giving the cold shoulder to the Nationalist movement, excused himself by saying, “I should like to be a patriot; but I can’t be. It’s all along of the rheumatism which prevents me from lying out at nights in a ditch with a rifle.” The same priest being reproached by others of the cloth with a fondness for the company of some of the resident landlords in his neighbourhood, replied, “It’s in the blood, you see. My poor mother, God rest her soul! she always had a liking for the quality. As for my dear father, he was just a blundering peasant like the rest of ye!”

GWEEDORE, Saturday, 4th Feb. A good day’s work to-day!

We left our hospitable friends at Sion House early in the morning. The sun was shining brightly; the air so soft and bland that the thrushes were singing like mad creatures in the trees and the shrubbery; and the sky was more blue than Italy. “A foine day it is, sorr,” said our jarvey as we took our seats on the car. There is some point in the old Irish sarcasm that English travellers in Ireland only see one side of the country, because they travel through it on the outside car. But to make this point tell, four people must travel on the car. In that case they must sit two on a side, each pair facing one side only of the landscape. It is a very different business when you travel on an outside car alone, with the driver sitting on one side of it, or with one companion only, when the driver occupies the little perch in front between the sides of the car. When you travel thus, the outside car is the best thing in the world, after a good roadster, for taking you rapidly over a country, and enabling you to command all points of the horizon. Double up one leg on the seat, let the other dangle freely, using the step as a stirrup, and you go rattling along almost as if you were on horseback.

We drove through a long suburb of Strabane into the busiest quarter of the busy little place. The names on the shops were predominantly Scotch ­Maxwells, Stewarts, Hamiltons, Elliotts. I saw but one Celtic name, M’Ilhenny, and one German, Straub. I changed gold for enormous Bank of Ireland notes at a neat local bank, and the cheery landlord of the Abercorn Arms gave us a fresh car to take us on to Letterkenny, a drive of some twenty miles.

The car came up like a small blizzard, flying about at the heels of an uncanny little grey mare. Lord Ernest knew the beast well, and said she was twenty-five years old. She behaved like an unbroken filly at first, but soon striking her pace, turned out a capital goer, and took us on without turning a hair till her work was done. The weather continued to be good, but clouds rolled up around the horizon.

“It’ll always be bad weather,” said our saturnine jarvey, “when the Judges come to hold court, and never be good again till they rise.”

Here is a consequence of alien rule in Ireland, never, so far as I know, brought to the notice of Parliament.

“Why is this?” I asked; “is it because of the time of the year they select?”

“The time of year, sorr?” he replied, glancing compassionately at me. “No, not at all; it’s because of the oaths!”

We reached Letterkenny in time for a very good luncheon at “Hegarty’s,” one of the neatest little inns I have ever found in a place of the size. It stands on the long main street which is really the town. At one end of this street is a very pretty row of picturesque ivy-clad brick cottages, built by a landlord whose property and handsome park bound the town on the west; and the street winds alongside the slope of a hill rising from the bank of the Swilly river. A fair was going on. The little market-place was alive with bustling, chattering, and chaffering country-folk. Smartly-dressed young damsels tripped in and out of the neat well-filled shops, and in front of a row of semidetached villas, like a suburban London terrace, on the hill opposite “Hegarty’s,” a German band smote the air with discordant fury. Decidedly a lively, prosperous little town is Letterkenny, nor was I surprised to learn from a communicative gentleman, nursing his cane near the inn-door, that advantage would be taken of the presence of the Hussars sent to keep order at Dunfanaghy, to “give a ball.”

“But I thought all the country was in arms about the trials at Dunfanaghy,” I said.

“In arms about the trials at Dunfanaghy? Oh no; they’ll never be locked up, Father M’Fadden and Mr. Blane. And the people here at Letterkenny, they’ve more sinse than at Dunfanaghy. Have you heard of the champagne?”

Upon this he proceeded to tell me, as a grand joke, that Father M’Fadden and Mr. Blane, M.P., having declined to accept the tea offered them by the authorities during their detention, they had been permitted to order what they liked from the local hotel-keeper. After the trial was over, and they were released on bail to prosecute their appeal, the hotel-keeper demanded of the authorities payment of his bill, including two bottles of champagne ordered to refresh the member for Armagh!

A conspicuous, smart, spick-and-span house on the main street, built of brick and wood, with a verandah, and picked out in bright colours, was pointed out to me by this amiable citizen as the residence of a “returned American.” This was a man, he said, who had made some money in America, but got tired of living there, and had come back to end his days in his native place He was a good man, my informant added, “only he puts on too many airs.”

A remarkably handsome, rosy-faced young groom, a model of manhood in vigour and grace, presently brought us up a wagonette with a pair of stout nags, and a driver in a suit of dark-brown frieze, whose head seemed to have been driven down between his shoulders. He never lifted it up all the way to Gweedore, but he proved to be a capital jarvey notwithstanding, and knew the country as well as his horses.

Not long after leaving the town by a road which passes the huge County Asylum (now literally crammed, I am told, with lunatics), we passed a ruined church on the banks of a stream. Here the country people, it seems, halt and wash their feet before entering Letterkenny, failing which ceremony they may expect a quarrel with somebody before they get back to their homes. This wholesome superstition doubtless was established ages ago by some good priest, when priests thought it their duty to be the preachers and makers of peace.

We soon left the wooded country of the Swilly and began to climb into the grand and melancholy Highlands of Donegal. The road was as fine as any in the Scottish Highlands, and despite the keen chill wind, the glorious and ever-changing panoramas of mountain and strath through which we drove were a constant delight, until, just as we came within full range of Muckish, the giant of Donegal, the weather finally broke down into driving mists and blinding rain.

We pulled up near a picturesque little shebeen, to water the horses and get our Highland wraps well about us. Out came a hardy, cheery old farmer. He swept the heavens with the eye of a mountaineer, and exclaimed: “Ah! it’s a coorse day intirely, it is.” “A coorse day intirely” from that moment it continued to be.

Happily the curtain had not fallen before we caught a grand passing glimpse of the romantic gorge of Glen Veagh, closed and commanded in the shadowy distance by the modern castle of Glenveagh, the mountain home of my charming country-woman, Mrs. Adair.

Thanks to its irregular serpentine outline, and to the desolate majesty of the hills which environ it, Lough Veagh, though not a large sheet of water, may well be what it is reputed to be, a rival of the finest lochs in Scotland. No traces are now discernible on its shores of the too celebrated evictions of Glen Veagh. But from the wild and rugged aspect of the surrounding country it is probable enough that these evictions were to the evicted a blessing in disguise, and that their descendants are now enjoying, beyond the Atlantic, a measure of prosperity and of happiness which neither their own labour nor the most liberal legislation could ever have won for them here. We caught sight, as we drove through Mrs. Adair’s wide and rocky domain, of wire fences, and I believe it is her intention to create here a small deer forest. This ought to be as good a stalking country as the Scottish Highlands, provided the people can be got to like “stalking” stags better than landlords and agents.

Long before we reached Glen Veagh we had bidden farewell, not only to the hedges and walls of Tyrone and Eastern Donegal, but to the “ditches,” which anywhere but in Ireland would be called “embankments,” and entered upon great stone-strewn wastes of land seemingly unreclaimed and irreclaimable. Huge boulders lay tossed and tumbled about as if they had been whirled through the air by the cyclones of some prehistoric age, and dropped at random when the wild winds wearied of the fun. The last landmark we made out through the gathering storm was the pinnacled crest of Errigal. Of Dunlewy, esteemed the loveliest of the Donegal lakes, we could see little or nothing as we hurried along the highway, which follows its course down to the Clady, the river of Gweedore; and we blessed the memory of Lord George Hill when suddenly turning from the wind and the rain into what seemed to be a mediaeval courtyard flanked by trees, we pulled up in the bright warm light of an open doorway, shook ourselves like Newfoundland dogs, and were welcomed by a frank, good-looking Scottish host to a glowing peat fire in this really comfortable little hotel, the central pivot of a most interesting experiment in civilisation.

GWEEDORE, Sunday, Feth. A morning as soft and bright almost as April succeeded the stormy night. Errigal lifted his bold irregular outlines royally against an azure sky. The sunshine glinted merrily on the swift waters of the Clady, which flows almost beneath our windows from Dunlewy Lough to the sea. The birds were singing in the trees, which all about our hotel make what in the West would be called an “opening” in the wide and woodless expanse of hill and bog.

This hotel was for many years the home of Lord George Hill, who built it in the hope of making Gweedore, what in England or Scotland it would long ago have become, a prosperous watering-place. Now that a battle-royal is going on between Lord George’s son and heir and the tenants on the estate, organised by Father M’Fadden under the “Plan of Campaign,” it is important to know something of the history of the place.

Is this a case of the sons of the soil expropriated by an alien and confiscating Government to enrich a ruthless invader? I was told by a Nationalist acquaintance in Dublin that the owner of Gweedore is a near kinsman of the Marquis of Londonderry, and that the property came to him by inheritance under an ancient confiscation of the estates of the O’Dounels of Tyrconnel. All of this I find is embroidery.

The “Carlisle” room, which our landlord has assigned to us, contains a number of books, the property of the late Lord George, and ample materials are here for making out the annals of Gweedore. Lord George, it seems, was a posthumous son of the fourth Marquis of Downshire, and a nephew of that Marchioness of Salisbury who was burned to death with the west wing of Hatfield House half a century ago. He inherited nothing in Donegal, nor was any provision made for him under his father’s will. His elder brothers made up and settled upon him a sum of twenty thousand pounds. He entered the Army, and being quartered for a time at Letterkenny, shot and fished all about Donegal. He found the people here kindly and friendly, but in a deplorable state of ignorance and of destitution. Their holdings under sundry small proprietors were entirely unimproved, and as their families increased, these holdings were cut up by themselves into even smaller strips under the system known as “rundale,” each son as he grew up taking off a slice of the paternal holding, putting up a hut with mud, and scratching the soil after his own rude fashion. This custom, necessarily fatal to civilisation, doubtless came down from the traditional times when the lands of a sept were held in common by the sept, before the native chieftains had converted themselves into landlords, and defeated Sir John Davies’s attempt to convert their tribal kinsmen into peasant proprietors.

Whatever its origin, it had reduced Gweedore, or “Tullaghobegly,” fifty years ago to barbarism. Nearly nine thousand people then dwelt here with never a landlord among them. There was no “Coercion” in Gweedore, neither was there a coach nor a car to be found in the whole district. The nominal owners of the small properties into which the district was divided knew little and cared less about them. The rents were usually “made by the tenants,” a step in advance, it will be seen, of the system which the collective wisdom of Great Britain has for the last twenty years been trying to establish in Ireland. But they were only paid when it was convenient. An agent of one of these properties who travelled fourteen miles one day to collect some rents gave it up and drove back again, because the “day was too bad” for him to wander about in the mountains on the chance of finding the tenants at home and disposed to give him a trifle on account. On most of the properties there were arrears of eight, ten, and twenty years’ standing.

There was one priest in the district, and one National School, the schoolmaster, with a family of nine persons, receiving the munificent stipend of eight pounds a year. These nine thousand people, depending absolutely upon tillage and pasture, owned among them all one cart and one plough, eight saddles, two pillions, eleven bridles, and thirty-two rakes! They had no means of harrowing their lands but with meadow rakes, and the farms were so small that from four to ten farms could be harrowed in a day with one rake.

Their beds were of straw, mountain grass, or green and dried rushes. Among the nine thousand people there were but two feather-beds, and but eight beds stuffed with chaff. There were but two stables and six cow-houses in the whole district. None of the women owned more than one shift, nor was there a single bonnet among them all, nor a looking-glass costing more than threepence.

The climate and the scenery took the fancy of Lord George. He made up his mind to see what could be done with this forgotten corner of the world, and to that end bought up as he could the small and scattered properties, till he had invested the greater part of his small fortune, and acquired about twenty thousand acres of land. Of this, little was fit for cultivation, even with the help of capital and civilised management. There was not a road in the district, nor a drain.

Lord George came and established himself here. He went to work systematically to improve the country, reclaiming bog-lands, building roads, and laying out the property into regular farms. He went about among the people himself, trying to get their confidence, and to let them know what he wanted to do for them, and with their help.

For a long time they wouldn’t believe him to be a lord at all, “because he spoke Irish”; and the breaking up of the rundale system, under which they had lived in higgledy-piggledy laziness, exasperated them greatly. Of the first man who took a fenced and well-defined farm from Lord George, and went to work on it, the others observed that he would come to no good by it, because he would “have to keep a maid just to talk to his wife.” Men could not be got for any wages to work at draining, or at making the “ditches” or embankments to delineate the new holdings; and when Lord George found adventurous “tramps” willing to earn a few shillings by honest work of the kind, conspiracies were formed to undo by night what was done by day. However, Lord George persevered.

There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse, nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed region. He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg, established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and finally put up the hotel in which we are. He advanced money to tenants disposed to improve their holdings. Finding the women, as usual, more thrifty and industrious than the men, and gifted with a natural aptitude for the loom and the spindle, he introduced the weaving of woollen yarn into stout frieze stuffs and foot-gear for both sexes. This was in 1840, and in 1854 Gweedore hand-knit socks and stockings were sold to the amount of L500, being just about the annual estimated rents of all the properties bought by Lord George at the time when he bought them in 1838! But with this difference: The owners from whom Lord George bought the properties got their L500 very irregularly, when they got it at all; whereas the wives and daughters of the tenants, who made the socks and stockings, were paid their L500 in cash.

Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit alike of the owner and of the occupiers of the land.

That the deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably clear. On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more favourable than here exist. North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring opens only in June. The farmers grow only oats and barley; but they have no market except for the barley, and live chiefly by the pasturage. It is as rocky a region as Donegal. But the Norsemen never try to make the land do more than it is capable of doing. With them the oldest son takes the farm and works it. The juniors are welcome to work on the farm if they like for their brother, but they are not allowed to cut it up. There is no rundale in Norway; and when the cadets see that there is no room for them they quietly “pull up stakes,” and go forth to seek a new home, no matter where.

For fourteen years Lord George Hill spent on Gweedore all the rents he received from it, and a great deal more. During that time the relations between the people and their new landlord seem to have been, in the main, most friendly, notwithstanding his constant efforts to break up their old habits, or, to use their own language, to “bother them.” But there were no “evictions”; rents were not raised even where the tenants were visibly able to pay better rents; prizes were given annually for the best and neatest cottages, for the best crops of turnips (neither turnips, parsnips, nor carrots were there at Gweedore when Lord George bought the estate), for the best pigs (there was not a pig in Gweedore in 1838!), for calves and colts, for the best fences, the best ordered tillage farms, the best labourers’ cottages, the best beds and bedding, the best butter, the best woollen goods made on the estate. The old rundale plan of dividing up the land among the children was put a stop to, and every tenant was encouraged not to make his holding smaller, but to add to and enlarge it. A corn-mill, saw-mill, and flax-mill were established. In 1838 there was not a baker within ten miles. In 1852 the local baker was driving a good business in good bread. The tenant’s wife, for whom in 1838 a single shift was a social superiority, in 1852 went shopping at Bunbeg for the latest fashions from Derry or Dublin.

Whatever “landlordism” may mean elsewhere in Ireland, it is plain enough that in the history of Gweedore it has meant the difference between savage squalor and civilisation.

Lord George Hill died in 1879, the year in which the Land League began its operations. He bequeathed this property to his son, Captain Hill, by whom the management of it has been left to agents. After Lord George’s death two tracts of mountain pasture, reserved by him to feed imported sheep, were let to the tenants, who by that time had come to own quite a considerable number, some thousands, of live stock, cattle, horses, and sheep.

Concurrently with this concession to the tenants the provisions made by Lord George against the subdivision of holdings began to give way. Father M’Fadden, combining the position of President of the National League with that of parish priest, seems to have favoured this tendency, and to have encouraged the putting up of new houses on reduced holdings to accommodate an increasing population. A flood which in August 1880 damaged the chapel and caused the death of five persons gave him an opportunity of bringing before the British public the condition of the people in a letter to the London Times, which elicited a very generous response, several hundred pounds, it is said, having been sent to him from London alone. Large contributions of relief were also made to Gweedore from the Duchess of Marlborough’s Fund, and Gweedore became a standing butt of British benevolence. Two results seem to have followed, naturally enough, a growing indisposition on the part of the tenants to pay rent, and a rapid rise in the value of tenant rights. With the National League standing between them and the landlord, with the British Parliament legislating year after year in favour of the Irish tenant and against the Irish landlord, and with the philanthropic public ready to respond to any appeal for help made on their behalf, the tenants at Gweedore naturally became a privileged class. In no other way at least can I explain the extraordinary fact that tenant rights at Gweedore have been sold, according to Lord Cowper’s Blue-book of 1886, during the period of the greatest alleged distress and congestion in this district, at prices representing from forty to a hundred-and-thirty years’ purchase of the landlord’s rent!

In this Blue-book the Rev. Father M’Fadden appears as receiving no less than L115 sterling for the tenant-right sold by him of ground, the head rent of which is L1, 2d. a year. The worst enemy of Father M’Fadden will hardly suspect him, I hope, of taking such a sum as this from a tenant farmer for the right to starve to death by inches.

A shrewd Galway man, now here, who seems to know the region well, and likes both the scenery and the people, tells me that the troubles which have now culminated in the arrest of Father M’Fadden have been aggravated by the vacillation of Captain Hill, and by the foibles of his agent, Colonel Dopping, who not long ago brought down Mr. Gladstone with his unloaded rifle. That the tenants as a body have been, or now are, unable to pay their rent he does not believe. On the contrary, he thinks them, as a body, rather well off. Certainly I have seen and spoken with none of them about the roads to-day who were not hearty-looking men, and in very good case. Colonel Dopping, according to my Galwegian, is not an Englishman, but a Longford Irishman of good family, who got his training in India as an official of the Woods and Forests in Bengal. “He is not a bad-hearted man, nor unkind,” said my Galwegian, “but he is too much of a Bengal tiger in his manner. He went into the cottages personally and lectured the people, and that they never will stand. They don’t require or expect you to believe what they say in fact they have little respect for you if you do but they like to have the agent pretend that he believes them, and then go on and show that he don’t. But he must never lose his temper about it. Colonel Dopping, I have heard, argued with an old woman one day who was telling him more yarns than were ever spun into cloth in Gweedore, till she picked up her cup of tea and threw it in his face. He flounced out of the cottage, and ordered the police to arrest her. That did him more harm than if he had shot a dozen boys.” “What with the temper of Colonel Dopping and the vacillation of Captain Hill, who is always of the mind of the last man that speaks to him, Father M’Fadden has had it all his own way. Captain Hill’s claim was for L1800 of arrears, long arrears too, and L400 of costs. How much the people paid in under the Plan of Campaign nobody knows but Father M’Fadden. But he is a clever padre, and he played Captain Hill till he finally gave up the costs, and settled for L1450.”

“And this sum represents what?”

“It represents in round numbers about two years’ income from an estate in which Captain Hill’s father must have invested, first and last, more nearly L40,000 than L20,000 of money that never came out of it.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very good operation. But isn’t the question, Whether the tenants have earned this sum, such as it is, out of the land let to them by Captain Hill?”

“No, not exactly, I think. You must remember there are some twelve hundred families living here on land bought with Lord George’s money, and enjoying all the advantages which the place owes to his investment and his management, much more than to any labour or skill of theirs. You must look at their rents as accommodation rents. Suppose they earn the rent in Scotland, or England, or Tyrone, or wherever you like, the question is, What do they get for it from Captain Hill? They get a holding with land enough to grow potatoes on, and with as much free fuel as ever they like, and with free pasture for their beasts, and all this they get on the average, mind you, for no more than ten shillings a year! Why, there was a time, I can assure you, when the women here earned the value of all the Hill rents by knitting stockings and making woollen stuffs. You see the stuffs lying here in this window that they make even now, and good stuffs too. But before the League boycotted the agency here, the agency ten years ago used to pay out L900 in a year, where it pays less than L100 to the women for their work.”

“Why did the League do this?”

“Why? Why, because it wanted to control the work itself, and to know just what it brings into the place. You must remember Father M’Fadden is the President of the League, and the people will do anything for him. I have heard of one old woman who sat up of nights last year knitting socks to send up to London, to pay the Christmas dues to the Father, six shillings’ worth.”

“And are these stuffs here in the hotel made for the agency you speak of?”

“Oh no; these are just made by women that know the hotel, and Mr. Robinson here, he kindly takes in the stuffs. You see the name of every woman on every one of them that made it, and the price. If a stranger buys some, he pays the money to Mr. Robinson, and so it goes to the women, and no commission charged.”

The “stuffs” are certainly excellent, very evenly woven; and the patterns, all devised, I am told, by the women themselves, very simple and tasteful. The only dyes used are got by the women also from the sea-weeds and the kelp, which must be counted among the resources of the place. The browns and ochres thus produced are both soft and vivid; while nothing can be better than a peculiar warm grey, produced by a skilful mingling of the undyed wools.

“What, then, causes the distress for which the name of Gweedore is a synonym?” I asked.

“It doesn’t exist,” responded my Galwegian; “that is, there is no such distress in Gweedore as you find in Connemara, for instance; but what distress there is in Gweedore is due much more to the habits the people have been getting into of late years, and to the idleness of them, than to any pressure of the rents you hear about, or even to the poverty of the soil. Go down to the store at Bunbeg, and see what they buy and go in debt for! You won’t find in any such place as Bunbeg in England such things. And even this don’t measure it; for, you see, two-thirds of them are not free to deal at Bunbeg.”

“Why not? Is Bunbeg ’boycotted’?”

“No, not at all. But they are on the books of the ’Gombeen man’ Sweeney of Dungloe and Burtonport. They’re always in debt to him for the meal; and then he backs the travelling tea-pedlars, and the bakers that carry around cakes, and all these run up the accounts all the time. Tot up what these people lay out for tea at four shillings a pound and they won’t have cheap tea and what they pay for meal, and what they pay for interest, and the ’testimonials,’ they paid for the monument here to O’Donnell, the Donegal man that murdered Carey, and the dues to the priest, and you’ll find the L700 or so they don’t pay the landlord going in other directions three and four times over.”

“Then they are falling back into all the old laziness, the men sauntering about, or sitting and smoking, while the women do all the work.”

The maid having told us Mass would be performed at noon, I walked with Lord Ernest a mile or so up the road to Derrybeg, to see the people thronging down from the hills; the women in their picturesque fashion wearing their bright shawls drawn over their heads. But the maid had deceived us. The Mass was fixed for eleven, and I suspect her of being a Protestant in disguise.

On the way back we met Mr. Burke, the resident magistrate. He has a neat house here, with a garden, and had come over from Dunfanaghy to see his wife. He meant to return before dark. The country was quiet enough, he said; but there were some troublesome fellows about, keeping up the excitement over the arrest at Father M’Fadden’s trial of Father Stephens a young priest recently from Liverpool, who has become the curate of quite another Father M’Fadden the parish priest of Falcarragh, and is giving his local superior a great deal of trouble by his activity in connection with the “Plan of Campaign.” Mr. Wybrants Olphert of Ballyconnell, the chief landlord of Falcarragh, has been “boycotted,” on suspicion of promoting the arrest of the two priests. Five policemen have been put into his house. At Falcarragh, where six policemen are usually stationed, there are now forty. Mr. Burke evidently thinks, though he did not say so, that Father Stephens has been spoiled of his sleep by the laurels of Father M’Fadden of Gweedore. He is to be tried at Dunfanaghy on Tuesday, and there are now 150 troops quartered there Rifles and Hussars.

“Are they not boycotted?” I asked.

“No. The people rather enjoy the bustle and the show, not to speak of the money the soldiers spend.”

Lord Ernest, who knows Mr. Olphert, sent him over a message by Mr. Burke that we would drive over to-morrow, and pay our respects to him at Ballyconnell. From this Mr. Burke tried to dissuade us, but what he told us naturally increased our wish to go.

After luncheon I ordered a car, and drove to Derrybeg, to call there on Father M’Fadden, Lord Ernest, who has already seen him, agreeing to call there for me on his return from a walk. We passed much reclaimed bogland, mostly now in grass, and looking fairly well; many piles of turf and clusters of cottages, well-built, but not very neatly kept. From each, as we passed, the inevitable cur rushed out and barked himself hoarse. Then came a waste of bog and boulders, and then a long, neat stone wall, well coped with unhewn stone, which announced the vicinity of Father M’Fadden’s house, quite the best structure in the place after the chapel and the hotel. It is of stone, with a neat side porch, in which, as I drove up, I descried Father M’Fadden, in his trim well-fitting clerical costume, standing and talking with an elderly lady. I passed through a handsome iron wicket, and introduced myself to him. He received me with much courtesy, and asked me to walk into his well-furnished comfortable study, where a lady, his sister, to whom he presented me, sat reading by the fire.

I told Father M’Fadden I had come to get his view of methods and things at Gweedore, and he gave it to me with great freedom and fluency. He is a typical Celt in appearance, a M’Fadden Roe, sanguine by temperament, with an expression at once shrewd and enthusiastic, a most flexible persuasive voice. All the trouble at Gweedore, he thought, came of the agents. “Agents had been the curse both of Ireland and of the landlord. The custom being to pay them by commissions on the sums collected, and not a regular salary, the more they can screw either out of the soil, or out of any other resources of the tenants, the better it is for them. At Gweedore the people earn what they can, not out of the soil, but out of their labour exported to Scotland, or England, or America. Only yesterday,” he continued, turning to his neat mahogany desk and taking up a letter, “I received this with a remittance from America to pay the rent of one of my people.”

“This was in connection,” I asked, “with the ‘Plan of Campaign’ and your contest here?”

“Yes,” he replied; “and a girl of my parish went over to Scotland herself and got the money due there for another family, and brought it back to me here. You see they make me a kind of savings-bank, and have done so for a long time, long before the ‘Plan of Campaign’ was talked about as it is now.”

This was interesting, as I had heard it said by a Nationalist in Dublin that the “Plan of Campaign” was originally suggested by Father M’Fadden. He made no such claim himself, however, and I made no allusion to this aspect of the matter. “I have been living here for fifteen years, and they listen to me as to nobody else.”

In these affairs with the agents, he had always told his people that “whenever a settlement came to be made, cash alone in the hand of the person representing them could make it properly.” “Cash I must have,” he said, “and hold the cash ready for the moment. When I had worked out a settlement with Captain Hill, I had a good part of the money in my hand ready to pay down. L1450 was the sum total agreed upon, and after the further collection, necessitated by the settlement, there was a deficit of about L200. I wrote to Professor Stuart,” he added, after a pause, “that I wanted about L200 of the sum-total. But more has come in since then. This remittance, from America yesterday, for example.”

“Do they send such remittances without being asked for them?” I inquired.

“Yes; they are now and again sending money, and some of them don’t send, but bring it. Some of them go out to America now as they used to go to England just to work and earn some money, and come back.

“If they get on tolerably well they stay for a while, but they find America is more expensive than Ireland, and if, for any cause, they get out of work there, they come back to Ireland to spend what they have. Naturally, you see,” said Father M’Fadden, “they find a certain pleasure to be seen by their old friends in the old place, after borrowing the four pounds perhaps to take them to America, coming back with the money jingling in their pockets, and in good clothes, and with a watch and a chain and a high hat. And there is in the heart of the Irishman an eternal longing for his native land constantly luring him back to Ireland. All do not succeed, though, in your country,” he said. “We hear of two out of ten perhaps who do very well. They take care we hear of that. The rest disappear, and are never heard of again.”

“Then you do not encourage emigration?” I, asked, “even although the people cannot earn their living from the soil?”

Father M’Fadden hesitated a moment, and then replied, “No, for things should be so arranged that they may earn their living, not out of the country, but on the soil at home. It is to that I want to bring the condition of the district.”

At this point Lord Ernest Hamilton came up and knocked at the door. He was most courteously received by Father M’Fadden. To my query why the Courts could not intervene to save the priests from taking all this trouble on themselves between the owners and the occupiers of the land, Father M’Fadden at first replied that the Courts had no power to intervene where, as in many cases in Gweedore, the holdings are subdivided.

“The Courts,” he said, “may not be, and I do not think they are, all that could be desired, though they undoubtedly do supply a more or less impartial arbitrator between the landlord and the tenant. It is an improvement on the past when the landlords fixed the rents for themselves.”

I did not remind him of what Lord George Hill tells us, that in the olden time at Gweedore the tenants fixed their own rents and then did not pay them but I asked him how this could be said when the tenant clearly must have accepted the rent, no matter who fixed it. “Oh!” said Father M’Fadden, “that may be so, but the tenant was not free, he was coerced. With all his life and labour represented in the holding and its improvements, he could not go and give up his holding. It’s a stand-and-deliver business with him the landlord puts a pistol to his head!”

“But is it not true,” I said, “that under the new Land Bill the Land Commissioner’s Court has power to fix the rents judicially without regard to landlord or tenant during fifteen years?”

“Yes, that is so,” said Father M’Fadden. “Under Mr. Gladstone’s Act of 81, and under the later Act of the present Government, the rents so fixed from ’81 to ’86 inclusive are subject to revision for three years; but the people have no confidence in the constitution of the Courts, and, as a matter of fact, the improvements of the tenants are confiscated under the Act of ’81, and the reductions allowed under the Act of ’87 are incommensurate with the fall in prices by 100 per cent. And there still remains the burden of arrears. I feel that I must stand between my people and obligations which they are unable to meet. To that end I take their money, and stand ready to use it to relieve them when the occasion offers. That is my idea of my work under the ’Plan of Campaign’; and, furthermore, I think that by doing it I have secured money for the landlord which he couldn’t possibly have got in any other way.”

This struck me as a very remarkable statement, nor can I see how it can be interpreted otherwise than as an admission that if the people had the money to pay their rents, they couldn’t be trusted to use it for that purpose, unless they put it into the control of the priest or of some other trustee.

Reverting to what he had said of the necessity for some change in the conditions of life and labour here, I asked if, in his opinion, the people could live out of the land if they got the ownership of it.

In existing circumstances he thought they could not.

Was he in favour, then, of Mr. Davitt’s plan of Land Nationalisation?

“Well, I have not considered the question of Nationalisation of the land.”

To my further question, What remedies he would himself propose for a state of things in which it was impossible for the people to live out of the land either as occupiers or as owners emigration being barred, Father M’Fadden, without looking at Lord Ernest, replied, “Oh, I think abler men who draw up Parliamentary Acts and live in public life ought to devise remedies, and that is a matter which would be best settled by a Home Government.”

The glove was well delivered, but Lord Ernest did not lift it.

“But, Father M’Fadden,” I said, “I am told you are a practical agriculturist and engineer, and that you have contrived to get excellent work done by the people here, dividing them off into working squads, and assigning so many perches to so many surely then you must understand better than a dozen members of Parliament what they can be got to do?”

He smiled at this, and finally admitted that he had a plan of his own. It was that the Government should advance sums for reclaiming the land. “The people could live on part of their earnings while thus employed, and invest the surplus in sheep to be fed on the hill pastures. When the reclamation was effected the families could be scattered out, and the holdings increased. In this district alone there are 350 holdings of reclaimable land of 20 acres each, the reclamation of which, according to a competent surveyor, “would pay well.” And the district could be improved by creating employment on the spot, establishing factories, developing fisheries, giving technical education, and encouraging cottage industries, which are so vigorously reviving in this district owing to the benevolent efforts of the Donegal Industrial Fund.”

Father M’Fadden spoke freely and without undue heat of his trial, and gave us a piquant account of his arrest.

This was effected at Armagh, just as he was getting into an early morning train. A sergeant of police walked up as the train was about to start, and asked

“Are you not Father M’Fadden of Gweedore?”

“What interest have you in my identity?” responded the priest.

“Only this, sir,” said the officer, politely exhibiting a warrant.

“I had been in Armagh the previous day,” said Father M’Fadden, “attending the month’s memory of the late deceased Primate of All Ireland, Dr. M’Gettigan, and stayed at a private residence, that of Surgeon-Major Lavery, not suspecting that while enjoying the genial hospitality of the Surgeon-Major my steps were dogged by a detective, and that gentleman’s house watched by police.”

Of the trial Father M’Fadden spoke with more bitterness. His eyes glowed as he exclaimed, “Can you imagine that they refused me bail, when bail had been allowed to such a felon as Arthur Orton? Why should I have been locked up over two Sundays, for ten days, when I offered to pledge my honour to appear?” He made no other complaint of the magistrate, and none of the prosecutor, Mr. Ross. He praised his own lawyer, too, but he strongly denounced the stenographer who took down his speech, or the parts of it which I told him I had seen in Dublin.

“Why, just think of it,” he exclaimed; “it took the clerk just eight minutes to read the report given by that stenographer of a speech which it took me an hour and twenty minutes to deliver! I do not speak from the lips, I speak from the heart, and consequently rather rapidly; and a stenographer who can take down 190 words a minute has told me I run ahead of him!”

I suggested that the report, without pretending even to be a full summary of his speech, might be accurate as to phrases and sentences pronounced by him.

“Yes, as to phrases,” he answered, “that might be; but the phrases may be taken out of their true connection, and strung together in an untruthful, yet telling way. Even my words were not fully set down,” he said, with some heat. “I was made to call a man ‘level,’ when I said in the American way that he was ‘level-headed.’” A propos of this, I am told that the American word “spree” has become Hibernian, and is used to describe meetings of the National League and “other political entertainments.”

When I told Father M’Fadden I had just come from Rome, where, as I had reason to believe, the Vatican was anxious to get evidence from others than Archbishop Walsh and Monsignore Kirby, of the Irish College, as to the attitude of the priests in Ireland towards the laws of the United Kingdom, he said he knew that “some Italian prelates neither understood nor approved the ‘Plan of Campaign,’ nor is the Irish Land question understood at Rome;” but this did not seem to disturb him much, as he was quite sure that in the end the “Plan of Campaign” would be legalised by the British Government. “I think I see plainly,” he said, “that Lord Ernest’s government is fast going to pieces, though I can’t expect him to admit it!” Lord Ernest laughed good-naturedly, and said that Father M’Fadden saw more in Donegal than he (Lord Ernest) was able to see in Westminster. Upon my asking him whether the “Plan of Campaign” did not in effect abrogate the moral duty of a man to meet the legal obligations he had voluntarily incurred, Father M’Fadden advanced his own theory of the subject, which was that, “if a man can pay a fair year’s rent out of the produce of his holding, he is bound to pay it. But if the rent be a rack-rent, imposed on the tenant against his will, or if the holding does not produce the rent, then I don’t think that is a strict obligation in conscience.”

In America, the courts, I fear, would make short work of this theory of Father M’Fadden. If a tenant there cannot pay his first quarter’s rent (they don’t let him darken his soul by a year’s liabilities) they promptly and mercilessly put him out.

Interesting as was our conversation with the parish priest of Gweedore, I felt that we might be trespassing too far upon his kindness and his time. So we rose to go. He insisted upon our going into the dining-room, where, as he told us, he had hospitably entertained sundry visiting statesmen from England, and there offered us a glass of the excellent wine of the country. He excused himself from joining us as being “almost a teetotaller.”

On our return to the hotel I met the Galwegian strolling about. When I told him of Father M’Fadden’s courteous hospitality, he said, “I am very glad you took that glass he offered. I really believe his quarrel with Captain Hill dates back to Hill’s declining that same courtesy under Father M’Fadden’s roof.”

GWEEDORE, Monday, Fe. Another very beautiful morning as a farmer said with whom I chatted on my morning stroll, “A grand day, sorr!” Errigal, which in this mountain atmosphere seems almost to hang over our hotel, but is in reality three or four miles away, stood out superbly against a clear azure sky, wreaths of soft luminous mist floating like a divine girdle half way up his bare volcanic peak.

I walked up to the Bunbeg road with Lord Ernest to call upon some peasants whom he knows. In one stone cabin, very well built and plastered, standing sidewise to the road, with doors on either side, we found the house apparently in charge of a little girl of nine or ten years, a weird but pretty child with very delicate well-cut features, who lay couchant upon her doubled-up arm on a low bed in a corner of the main room, and peered at us over her elbow with sparkling inquisitive eyes.

By her side sat a man with his cap on, who might have been the “young Pretender,” or the “old Kaiser,” so far as his looks went towards indicating his age. He never rose or welcomed us, being, as we afterwards found out, only a visitor like ourselves, and a kinsman of Mrs. M’Donnell, the head of the house. “Mrs. M’Donnell,” he said, “is gone to the store at Bunbeg.”

This main room rose perhaps ten feet in height to the open roof. It had one large and well-glazed window. When Lord George Hill came here there were not ten square feet of window-glass in the whole parish outside of the Church, the national school, and the residence of the chief police-officer.

Windows when there were any were closed with dried sheepskins, through which the cats ran in and out as freely as through the curious tunnel which the kindly Master of Blantyre has constructed at Sheba’s Cross for their special benefit.

There were two beds in the main room; rather high than low, one of rushes, on which lay the child of whom I have spoken, and one of greater pretensions vacant in another corner.

The door stood wide open, but the cabin was warm and comfortable, and a peat fire smouldered, sending up, to me, most agreeable odours. An inner room seemed to be a sort of granary, full of hay and straw. There the cow is kept at night. “It’s handy if you want a drink of milk,” said the visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden houses of hundreds of struggling farmers in the older Eastern States. I am sure my old friend Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, who made the only thorough surveys of agricultural life in the United States before the Civil War, would have pronounced it in all respects superior, so far as health and comfort go, to the average home of the average “poor buccra,” between the Chesapeake and the Sabine. I am afraid a great deal of not wholly innocuous nonsense has been written and spoken about this part of the United Kingdom by well-meaning philanthropists who have gauged the condition of the people here by their own standards of comfort and enjoyment. Most things in this life of ours are relative. I well remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compassion for a judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live “upon a pittance of eight thousand dollars a year.”

These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands of their own race in the slums of New York and Chicago and Liverpool and London.

Mrs. M’Donnell’s cousin, however, took dark views of things. The times “were no good at all.”

The potatoes, I had heard, were doing well this year.

“No! they wouldn’t keep the people; indeed, they wouldn’t. There would have to be relief.”

“Why not manure the land?”

“Manure? oh yes, the sea-stuff was good manure, but the people couldn’t get it. They had no boats; and it cost eighteenpence a load to haul it from Bunbeg. No! they couldn’t get it off the rocks. At the Rosses they might; the Rosses were not so badly off as Derrybeg or Gweedore, for all they might say.”

“But Father M’Fadden had urged me,” I said, “to see the Rosses, because the people there were worse off than any of the people.”

“Well, Father M’Fadden was a good man; he was a friend of the people; and they were bad indeed at the Rosses, but they could get the sea-stuff there, and hadn’t to pay for cartage. And indeed, if you put the sea-stuff on the bogland, the land was better in among the rocks’ at the Rosses than was the bogland, it was indeed: the stuff did no good at all the first year. The second and the third it gave good crops but then you must burn it and by the fourth year and the fifth it was all ashes, and no good at all! This was God’s truth, it was; and there must be relief.”

“But could the people earn nothing in Scotland or in Tyrone?”

“Oh no, they could earn nothing at all. They could pay no rent.”

So he sat there, a Jeremiah among the potsherds, quite contented and miserable well and hearty in a ragged frieze coat, with his hat over his eyes.

While we talked, a tall lusty young beggar-girl wandered in and out unnoticed. Chickens pecked and fluttered about, and at intervals the inevitable small dog suddenly barked and yelped.

On our way back we met the elder daughter of Mrs. M’Donnell, a girl of sixteen, the “beauty of Gweedore.” A beauty she certainly is, and of a type hardly to have been looked for here.

Her lithe graceful figure, her fine, small, chiselled features, her shapely little head rather defiantly set on her sloping shoulders, her fair complexion and clear hazel eyes, her brown golden hair gathered up behind into a kind of tress, all these were Saxon rather than Celtic. Her trim neat ankles were bare, after the mountain fashion, but she was prettily dressed in a well-fitting dark blue gown, wore a smartly trimmed muslin apron, with lace about her throat, and carried over her arm a new woollen shawl, very tasteful and quiet in colour. She greeted us with a self-possessed smile.

“No,” she had not, been shopping with her mother. The shawl was a present from one of her cousins. Did we not think it very pretty? She was only out for a walk, and had no notion where her mother might be. A stalwart red-bearded man who lounged and loitered behind her on the road was “only a friend,” she said, “not a relation at all!” Nor did she show, I am sorry to say, any compassion for the evident uneasiness with which, from a distance, he regarded her long and affable parley with two strangers.

We asked her whether she expected and wished to live in Gweedore, or would like to follow elsewhere some calling or trade. “Oh yes,” she unhesitatingly replied, “I should like to be a dress-maker in Deny; but,” she added pensively, “it’s no use my thinking about it, for I know I shouldn’t be let!”

“Wouldn’t you like Dublin as well?” I asked.

“Perhaps; but I shouldn’t be let go to Dublin either!”

Would she like to go to America?

“No!” she didn’t think much of “the Americans who came back,” and America must be “a very hard country for work, and very cold in the winter.”

Now this was a widow’s daughter, living in such a cabin as I have described, and upon a small holding in a parish reputed to be the most “distressful” in Donegal!

Returning to the hotel we found our car ready for Falcarragh. Our driver was a quiet, sensible fellow, who did not seem to care sixpence about the great Nationality question, though he knew the country very well.

Iron was visible in the rocks as we drove along, and we passed some abandoned mining works, “lead and silver mines;” he said, “they were given up long before his time.” We got many fine views of the mountains Errigal, Aghla More, and Muckish. Lough Altan, a wild tarn, lies between Errigal and Aghla More.

The peasants we met stared at us curiously, but, were very civil, even at a place bearing the ominous name of Bedlam, against which Mr. Burke had warned us as the most troublesome on the way. All the countryside was there attending a fair, and we drove through throngs of red-shawled, barelegged women, ponies, horses, cattle, and sheep. Of Tory Island, with its famous tower, dating back to the fabled “Fomorians,” we had some grand glimpses. The white surf, flashing and leaping high in the air on the nearer islets accented and gave life to the landscape.

In one glorious landlocked bay, we saw not a single boat riding. Our driver said, “The fishermen all live on Tory Island, and send their fish to Sligo. The people on the mainland don’t like going out in the boats.”

Lord Ernest tells me there is a movement to have a telegraph station set up on Tory Island, to announce the Canadian steamers coming into Moville for Deny.

We found Falcarragh, or “Cross-Roads,” a large clean-looking village, consisting of one long and broad street, through which horses and cattle were wandering in numbers, apparently at their own sweet will.

Ballyconnell House, the seat of Mr. Wybrants Olphert, is the manor house of the place. As we drew near, no signs appeared of the dreadful “Boycott.” The great gates of the park stood hospitably open, and we drove in unchallenged past a pretty ivy-clad lodge, and through low, but thickly planted groves. A huge boulder, ruddy with iron ore, bears the uncanny and unspellable name of the “Clockchinnfhaelaidh,” or “Stone of Kinfaele.” Upon this stone, tradition tells us, Balor, a giant of Tory Island, chopped off the head of an unreasonable person named Mackinfeale, for complaining that Balor, under some prehistoric “Plan of Campaign,” had driven away his favourite cow, Glasgavlan.

Ballyconnell House, a substantial mansion of the Georgian era, stands extremely well. Over a fine sloping lawn in front, you have a glorious view of the sea, and of a very fine headland, known as “the Duke’s Head,” from the really remarkable resemblance it bears to the profile of Wellington. The winds have such power here that there are but few well-grown trees, and those near the house. About them paraded many game-hens, spirited birds, looking like pheasants. These, as we learned, never sleep save in the trees.

The “boycotted” lord of the manor came out to greet us a handsome, stalwart man of some seventy years, with a kindly face, and most charming manners. His family, presumably of Dutch origin, has been established here since Charles II. He himself holds 18,133 acres here, valued at L1802 a year; and he is a resident landlord in the fullest sense of the term. For fifty years he has lived here, during all which time, as he told us to-day, he has “never slept for a week out of the country.” His furthest excursions of late years have been to Raphoe, where he has a married daughter. “Absenteeism” clearly has nothing to do with the quarrel between Mr. Olphert and his tenants, or with the “boycotting” of Ballyconnell.

The dragoons from Dunfanaghy had just ridden away as we came up. They had come over in full fig to show themselves, and to encourage the respectable Catholics of Falcarragh, who side with their parish priest, Father M’Fadden of Glena, and object to the vehement measures, promoted by his young curate, Father Stephens, recently of Liverpool. The people had received them with much satisfaction. “They had never seen the cavalry before, and were much delighted!”

Before we sat down to luncheon young Mr. Olphert came in. It was curious to see this quiet, well-bred young gentleman throw down his belt and his revolver on the hall table, like his gloves and his umbrella. “Quite like the Far West,” I said. “And we are as far in the West as we can get,” he replied laughingly.

Our luncheon was excellent so good, in fact, that we felt a kind of remorse as if we had selfishly quartered ourselves upon a beleaguered garrison. But Mr. Olphert said he had no fear of being starved out. Personally he was, and always had been, on the best terms with the people of Falcarragh. The older tenants, even now, if he met them walking in the fields when no one was in sight, would come up and salute him, and say how “disgusted” they were with what was going on. It was the younger generation who were troublesome more troublesome, he added, to their own parish priest than they were to him. Three or four years ago a returned American Irishman, an avowed unbeliever, but an active Nationalist and one of Mr. Forster’s “suspects,” had come into the neighbourhood and done his worst to break up the parish. He used to come to Falcarragh on a Sunday, and get up on a stone outside the chapel while Father M’Fadden was saying Mass or preaching, and harangue such people as would listen to him, and caricature the priest and the sermon going on within sound of his own voice. “I am myself a Protestant,” said Mr. Olphert, “but I have a great respect for priests who do their duty; and the conduct of Father M’Fadden of Gweedore, in countenancing this man, who tried to overthrow the authority of Father M’Fadden of Glena, excited my indignation. As to what is going on now,” said Mr. Olphert, “it is to Father M’Fadden of Gweedore, and to Father Stephens here, that the trouble is chiefly to be charged.” This tallies with what I heard at Gweedore from my Galwegian acquaintance. He thought Mr. Olphert, and Mr. Hewson, the agent, ought to have made peace on the terms which Father Stephens said he was willing to accept for the tenants, these being a reduction of 3d. in the pound, if Mr. Olphert would extend the reduction to the whole year. My Galwegian thought this reasonable, because in this region the rent, it appears, is only collected once a year. With this impartial temper, my Galwegian still maintained that but for the two priests the parish priest of Gweedore and the curate of Falcarragh there need have been no trouble at Falcarragh. There had been no “evictions.” When the tenants first went to Mr. Olphert they asked a reduction of 4s. in the pound on the non-judicial rents, and this Mr. Olphert at once agreed to give them. The tenants had regularly paid their rents for ten years before. That they are not going down in the world would appear from the fact that the P.O. Savings Banks’ deposits at Falcarragh, which stood at L62, 15d. in 1880, rose in 1887 to L494, 10d. A small number of them had gone into Court and had judicial rents fixed; and it was on the contention promoted by the two priests, through these judicial tenants, he said, that all the difficulty hinged. Father M’Fadden of Glena, who thought the quarrel unjustifiable and silly, had an interview with Mr. Blane, M.P., and with Father Stephens, and tried to arrange it all. He would have succeeded, my Galwegian thought, had not the agent, Mr. Hewson, obstinately fought with the obstinate curate, Father Stephens, over the suggestion made by the latter, that the terms granted on the fine neighbouring estate of Mr. Stuart of Ards a man of wealth, who lives mainly at Brighton, though Ards is one of the loveliest places in Ireland should be extended by Mr. Olphert for a whole year to his own people, who had never asked for anything of the kind!

Mr. Olphert said he knew Gweedore well. He owns a “townland" there, on which he has thirty-five tenants, none of them on a holding at more more than L4 a year. Father M’Fadden of Gweedore, he said, finding that the people on Mr. Olphert’s townland were going back to the “Rundale” practices, tried to induce Mr. Olphert to return all these subdivisions as “tenancies.” This he refused to do. As to the resources of the peasantry, he thought them greater than they appeared to be. “This comes to light,” said Mr. Olphert, “whenever there is a tenant-right for sale. There is never any lack of money to buy it, and at a round good price.” The people also, he thinks, spend a great deal on what they regard as luxuries, and particularly on tea. “A cup of tea could not be got for love or money in Gweedore, when Lord George Hill came there. You might as well have asked for a glass of Tokay.”

Now they use and abuse it in the most deleterious way imaginable. They buy the tea at exorbitant rates, often at five shillings a pound, and usually on credit, paying a part of one bill on running up another, put it into a saucepan or an iron pot, and boil, or rather stew, it over the fire, till they brew a kind of hell-broth, which they imbibe at odd moments all day long! Oddly enough, this is the way in which they prepare tea in Cashmere and other parts of India, with this essential difference, though, that the Orientals mitigate the astringency of the herb with milk and almonds and divers ingredients, tending to make a sort of “compote” of it. Taken as it is taken here, it must have a tremendous effect on the nerves. Mr. Olphert thinks it has had much to do with the increase of lunacy in Ireland of late years. From his official connection with the asylum at Letterkenny, he knows that while it used to accommodate the lunatics of three counties, it is now hardly adequate to the needs of Donegal alone.

Everything about Ballyconnell House is out of key with the actual military conditions of life here. It is essentially what Tennyson calls “an ancient home of ordered peace.” In the ample hall hang old portraits and trophies of the chase. The large and handsome library, panelled in rich dark wood, is filled full of well-bound books. Prints, busts, the thousand and one things of “bigotry and virtue” which mark the dwelling-place of educated and thoughtful people are to be seen on every side. Mr. Olphert showed us a cabinet full of bronzes, picked up on the strand of the sea. Among these were brooches, pins, clasps, buckles, two very fine bronze swords, and a pair of bronze links engraved with distinctly Masonic emblems, such as the level, the square, and the compasses. When were these things made, and by what people?

So far as I know, Masonry in the British Islands cannot be historically traced back much, if at all, beyond the Revolution of 1688.

Mr. Olphert and his son walked about the place with us. They have no fears of an attack, but think it wise to keep a force of police on the premises. The only demonstration yet made of any kind against the house was the march from Falcarragh some time ago of a mob of young men, who promptly withdrew on catching sight of half-a-dozen policemen within the park gates. As to getting his work done, some of his people had steadily refused to acknowledge the “boycott,” and they were now strengthened by the attitude of those who had surrendered to the pressure, and were now sullen and angry with the League which had given them nothing to do, and no supplies.

At Falcarragh we met a person who knew much about the late Lord Leitrim, who was murdered in this neighbourhood on the highway some years ago. He spoke freely of the murderer by name, as if it were matter of common notoriety. Of the murdered man, he said that he had made himself extremely unpopular and odious, not so much by certain immoralities freely alleged at the time of his death, as by vexatious meddling with the prejudices and whims of his tenants. “He used to go into the houses and pull down cartoons and placards, if he saw them put up on the walls.” “No! he had no party feeling in the matter; he used to pull down William III. and the Pope with an equal hand.” It seems that in this region, too, a local legend has grown up of the birth at a place called Cashelmore of a “Queen of France.” The case is worth noting as throwing light on the genesis and accuracy of local traditions. The “Queen of France” referred to proves, on inquiry, to have been Miss Patterson, who married Jerome Bonaparte, brother of the first Emperor, afterwards created by him King of Westphalia! This Avas the lady so well known in America as Mrs. Patterson Bonaparte of Baltimore, who died at a great age only a few years ago. I have no reason to suppose that she was born at Cashelmore at all or in Ireland. But her father, reputed in the time of Washington to be the richest man in the United States, who came from the North of Ireland and settled in Baltimore as a merchant, may very well have been born there.

To my great regret Father M’Fadden of Glena, or Falcarragh, was absent from home. As we drove homeward we met on the way a young lady on a smart jaunting-car, with a servant in livery. This was the daughter, our driver told us, of Mr. Griffiths, the Protestant clergyman, past whose residence our road lay. His church stands high upon a commanding cliff, and is a feature in the landscape. We met the parson himself also, walking with a friend. The road from Bedlam to Derrybeg goes by a region of the “Rosses,” reputed the most woe-begone part of the Gweedore district. This is the scene of a curious tale told about Father M’Fadden of Gweedore, by his ill-wishers in these parts, to the effect that he advises English Members of Parliament and other “sympathising” visitors who come here to make a pilgrimage to “the Bosses,” where, no matter at what time of day they appear, they invariably find sundry of the people sitting in their huts and eating stewed seaweed out of iron pots. I cannot vouch for this tale, but certainly I have seen no people here of either sex, or of any age, who look as if they lived on stewed seaweed. Another person at Falcarragh told us, as an illustration of the influence exerted by Father M’Fadden of Gweedore, in this parish, over which he has no proper authority, that, in obedience to an intimation from him, the persons whose seats in the chapel had been occupied on two successive Sundays by the policemen now stationed here, yesterday refused to allow the policemen to occupy them, the only exception being in the case of a man who had been arrested at the same time with Father Stephens, and who had been so well treated by the police, that he felt bound to repay their courtesy by offering one of them his seat.