or a window. In this cell the Red Hugh
O'Donnell of Tyrconnel was kept as a prisoner for several years under
Elizabeth. He was young and lithe, however, and after his friends had
tried in vain to buy him out, a happy thought one day struck him. He
squeezed himself through the loophole, and, dropping unhurt to the
ground, escaped to the mountains. There for a long time he made head
against the English power. In 1597 he drove Sir Conyers Clifford from
before the castle of Ballyshannon, with great loss to the English, and
when he could no longer keep the field, he sought refuge in Spain. He
was with the Spanish, as Prince of Tyrconnel, at the crushing defeat of
Kinsale in 1601. Escaping again, he died, poisoned, at Simancas the next
year.

Sir Bernard showed us, among other curious manuscripts, a correspondence
between one Higgins, a trained informer, and the Castle authorities in
1798. This correspondence shows that the revolutionary plans of the
Nationalists of 1798 were systematically laid before the Government.

When one thinks how very much abler were the leaders of the Irish
rebellion in 1798 than are the present heads of the Irish party in
Parliament, how much greater the provocations to rebellion given the
Irish people then were than they are now even alleged to be--how little
the Irish people in general have now to gain by rebellion, and how much
to lose, it is hard to resist a suspicion that it must be even easier
now than it was in 1798 for the Government to tap the secrets of the
organisations opposed to it.

Sir Bernard showed us also a curious letter written by Henry Grattan to
the founder of the great Guinness breweries, which have carried the fame
of Dublin porter into the uttermost parts of the earth. The Guinnesses
are now among the wealthiest people of the kingdom, and Ireland
certainly owes a great deal to them as "captains of industry," but they
are not Home Rulers.

At the Kildare Street Club in the afternoon I talked with two Irish
landlords from the north of Ireland, who had come up to take their
womenkind to the Drawing-Room.

I was struck by their indifference to the political excitements of the
day. One of them had forgotten that the Ripon and Morley reception was
to take place to-night. The other called it "the love-feast of Voltaire
and the Vatican." Both were much more fluent about hunting and farming.
I asked if the hunting still went on in their part of the island.

"It has never stop