s 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