it, and at a round good price."
The people also, he thinks, spend a great deal on what they regard as
luxuries, and particularly on tea. "A cup of tea could not be got for
love or money in Gweedore, when Lord George Hill came there. You might
as well have asked for a glass of Tokay."

Now they use and abuse it in the most deleterious way imaginable. They
buy the tea at exorbitant rates, often at five shillings a pound, and
usually on credit, paying a part of one bill on running up another, put
it into a saucepan or an iron pot, and boil, or rather stew, it over the
fire, till they brew a kind of hell-broth, which they imbibe at odd
moments all day long! Oddly enough, this is the way in which they
prepare tea in Cashmere and other parts of India, with this essential
difference, though, that the Orientals mitigate the astringency of the
herb with milk and almonds and divers ingredients, tending to make a
sort of "compote" of it. Taken as it is taken here, it must have a
tremendous effect on the nerves. Mr. Olphert thinks it has had much to
do with the increase of lunacy in Ireland of late years. From his
official connection with the asylum at Letterkenny, he knows that while
it used to accommodate the lunatics of three counties, it is now hardly
adequate to the needs of Donegal alone.

Everything about Ballyconnell House is out of key with the actual
military conditions of life here. It is essentially what Tennyson calls
"an ancient home of ordered peace." In the ample hall hang old portraits
and trophies of the chase. The large and handsome library, panelled in
rich dark wood, is filled full of well-bound books. Prints, busts, the
thousand and one things of "bigotry and virtue" which mark the
dwelling-place of educated and thoughtful people are to be seen on every
side. Mr. Olphert showed us a cabinet full of bronzes, picked up on the
strand of the sea. Among these were brooches, pins, clasps, buckles, two
very fine bronze swords, and a pair of bronze links engraved with
distinctly Masonic emblems, such as the level, the square, and the
compasses. When were these things made, and by what people?

So far as I know, Masonry in the British Islands cannot be historically
traced back much, if at all, beyond the Revolution of 1688.

Mr. Olphert and his son walked about the place with us. They have no
fears of an attack, but think it wise to keep a force of police on the
premises. The only demonstration yet made of any kind