are without the faculty of industrial enterprise.
They are always waiting for weather, wind, and tide. They lack
resourcefulness, energy, invention. When the flour mills ceased to pay
they had no notion of using the buildings and water-power for some
other purpose. When the Coventry ribbon trade went to the dogs the
people found salvation in bicycles. If Coventry had been in Ireland
the people would have starved and murmured to the end of time.

Two miles out we came to Deradda, where eighty men were at work. Next
came Shellogah and the squeamish bit of bog. A number of men were busy
on the line, and right in front of us was a gap in the rails, the
platelayers laying the steel for dear life while the engine came up.
We slackened speed, but made no stop, and the last rail was finally
bolted as we ran upon it. Carefully and gingerly we pushed along, my
triumphal chariot in front of the engine, over the shivering
embankment, on each side of which were deep-cut channels which seemed
to have been hewn through acres of Day and Martin's blacking, so jetty
and oily seemed this Irish bog. The subsidence of yesterday had forced
the boundary walls of the line into wide semicircles, and it seemed
likely to be touch-and-go with the engine, truck, and your humble
commissioner. I took a last look at the landscape, and made a final
note, but, while inly wondering whether I should be ultimately
consumed in the form of peat or dug up and exhibited to future ages as
a bog-preserved brutal Saxon, with a concluding squash we passed the
rotten spot, and it was permissible to breathe again. "We prefer it to
sink at once," said Mr. Bennett. "Then we know the 'hard' is not far
off, and we can fill up till the line becomes solid as a rock. When it
goes down by degrees, sinking a foot to-day and a foot to-morrow, we
find our work more difficult. We never leave a bad bit till we are
assured, by careful examination and severe and repeated tests, that
all is solid and secure." He told me how much earth had been dumped on
this spot, which, like the soft place mentioned in my last, has given
Mr. Balfour's _proteges_ a world of employment. I forget the quantity,
but it sounded like an island or a small range of mountains. Soon on
the left we saw the great expanse of Clew Bay, with its three hundred
and sixty-five considerable islands, nearly all with cottages, cattle,
and pasture, but without a tree. The Yankee breezes blew refreshingly,
and the scener