, and emerging from the fiery ordeal,
begrimed and swarthy, your knees half cooked by the engine fire. All
this happened on my journey from Westport to Newport, but now the
truck promised Sybaritic luxury, and if the rail should again give
way, if the bog-hole, "still gaping to devour me, opened wide," I
should at least disappear with dignity, should take my _holium cum
dignitatis_ in a truck, on a green-covered seat, and with the
consciousness that I was doing something to fill up the gap, to solace
the aching void in Ireland's bosom. Away we went, thundering along
between the quivering bogs, as through a land of brown-black
calves'-foot jelly. The line itself is sound, well-made and firm. I
had this from Mr. Hare, engineer of the Board of Works, who said that
Mr. Worthington's railways have an excellent name for solidity and
thorough, conscientious work. Mr. Hare was formally taking over the
last bit of line, that between Mulranney and Achil Sound, with which
the Midland and Great Western Company will at present have nought to
do. The company will work from Westport to Mulranney, although some
portions of the line have a gradient of one in sixty, and the
directors are shy of anything steeper than one in a hundred by reason
of the wear and tear involved to rolling stock and permanent way by
gradients requiring so much brake power. But the last seven miles they
decline to touch on the terms offered by the Government at present. No
doubt the line will be worked, and by the company aforesaid, but the
contracting parties are for the moment at a deadlock. No line between
Mulranney and the Sound could possibly pay. England is building Irish
railways to give the people a chance, as the splendid quays of
Newport, Limerick, and Galway were built.

Nothing, or next to nothing, is done on these quays. The Channel, as
it is called at Newport, is a fine expanse of water about one hundred
and twenty yards wide, leading through Newport Bay directly into the
Atlantic. Only one boat, I was told, comes into the port. I saw it
there, unloading a hundred and eighty tons of Indian corn--a Glasgow
vessel, the Harmony, a sailer, which had taken three weeks to the
voyage, which a steamer easily runs in thirty six to forty hours.
Galway was busier, but not by Irish enterprise, and Limerick was
mostly fast asleep. The people cry aloud and shout for quays,
harbours, piers, and railways; and when they are built they ask for
something else. They