e cattle in his plough or the oxen in his team. But here you
really have a people quick, sharp-sighted, and intelligent, able to
scan your motives with ten times the accuracy you can guess at theirs;
suspicious, because their credulity has been abused; revengeful, because
their wild nature knows no other vindicator than their own right arm;
lawless, for they look upon your institutions as the sources of their
misery and the instruments of your tyranny towards them; reckless, for
they have nothing to lose; indolent, for they have nothing to gain.
Without an effort to win their confidence or secure their good-will,
you overwhelm them with your institutions, cumbrous, complicated,
and unsuitable; and while you neglect or despise all appeal to their
feelings or affections, you place your faith in your soldiery or a
special commission. Heaven help you! you may thin them off by the
gallows and transportation, but the root of the evil is as far from you
as ever. You do not know them, you will not know them. More prone to
punish than prevent, you are satisfied with the working of the law, and
not shocked with the accumulation of crime; and when, broken by poverty
and paralysed by famine, a gloomy desolation spreads over the land, you
meet in terms of congratulation to talk over tranquilised Ireland.'

In this strain did the good priest continue to develop his views
concerning his country--the pivot of his argument being, that, to a
people so essentially different in every respect, English institutions
and English laws were inadequate and unsuitable. Sometimes I could
not only but agree with him. At others I could but dimly perceive his
meaning and dissent from the very little I could catch.

Enough of this, however. In a biography so flimsy as mine, politics
would play but an unseemly part; and even were it otherwise, my
opportunities were too few and my own incapacity too great to make my
opinions of any value on a subject so complicated and so vast. Still,
the topic served to shorten the road, and when towards evening we
found ourselves in the comfortable parlour of the little inn at
Ballyhocsousth,* so far had we both regained our spirits that once more
the priest's jovial good-humour irradiated his happy countenance; and
I myself, hourly improving in health and strength, felt already the
bracing influence of the mountain air, and that strong sense of liberty
never more thoroughly appreciated than when regaining vigour after