am could afford." Poor Father Curran! Poor Tuam! Poor Tuamites
with their rags, pigs, filth, priests, fairies, and Intelligence! I
shall visit them once more. A few photographs from the Galway Road
would settle the dispute, and render null and void all future Town's
meetings. They have sworn to slay me, but in visiting their town I
fear nothing but vermin and typhoid fever. Their threats affect me
not. As one of their own townsmen remarked,--

"You cannot believe a word they say. They never speak the truth except
when they call each other liars. And when they are in fear, although
too lazy to work, they are never too lazy to run. They have no
independence of thought or action. Their religion crushes all manhood
out of them. They are the obedient servants of the priests, and no man
dare say his soul's his own. Any one who did not attend that meeting
would be a marked man, but if it had been limited to people who know
the use of soap it would necessarily have been small, even for the
Tuam Town Hall."

Everywhere in Connaught I hear the people saying, "When you want to
roast an Irishman you can always find another Irishman to turn the
spit."

Thrue for ye, ma bouchal!

Ballina, June 10th.

No. 34.--WHY IRELAND DOES NOT PROSPER.

A community of small farmers with a sprinkling of resident gentry. All
sorts of land within a small compass, rock, bog, tillage, and
excellent grazing. The churchyard is a striking feature. A ruined
oratory covered with ivy is surrounded by tombstones and other
mortuary memorials strange to the Saxon eye. The graves are dug east
and west on a rugged mound hardly deserving to be called a hill,
although here and there steep enough. Huge masses of sterile mountain
form the background, and from the ruin the Atlantic is seen, gleaming
in the sun. Patches of bog with diggers of turf, are close by the
untouched portions covered with white bog-bean blooms, which at a
short distance look like a snowfall. On a neighbouring hill is a fine
old Danish earthwork, a fort, called by the natives "The Rath," fifty
yards in diameter, the grassy walls, some ten feet high and four yards
thick, reared in a perfect circle, on which grow gorse and brambles.
The graveyard is sadly neglected. Costly Irish crosses with elaborate
carving stand in a wilderness of nettles and long grass. Not a
semblance of a path anywhere. To walk about is positively dangerous.
Ruined tombstones, and broken slabs which appear to