r met. His narrow ideas in regard to woman, and the
superiority of the royal and noble classes in his own country, were to
me so exasperating that I grew more and more bellicose every day we
traveled in company. He was terribly seasick crossing the Channel, to my
intense satisfaction. As he always boasted of his distinguished
countrymen, I suggested, in the midst of one of his most agonizing
spasms, that he ought to find consolation in the fact that Lord Nelson
was always seasick on the slightest provocation.

The poverty in Ireland was a continual trial to our sensibilities;
beggars haunted our footsteps everywhere, in the street and on the
highways, crouching on the steps of the front door and on the
curbstones, and surrounding our carriage wherever and whenever we
stopped to shop or make a visit. The bony hands and sunken eyes and
sincere gratitude expressed for every penny proved their suffering real.
As my means were limited and I could not pass one by, I got a pound
changed into pennies, and put them in a green bag, which I took in the
carriage wherever I went. It was but a drop in the ocean, but it was all
I could do to relieve that unfathomed misery. The poverty I saw
everywhere in the Old World, and especially in Ireland, was a puzzling
problem to my mind, but I rejected the idea that it was a necessary link
in human experience--that it always had been and always must be.

As we drove, day by day, in that magnificent Phoenix Park, of fifteen
hundred acres, one of the largest parks, I believe, in the world, I
would often put the question to myself, what right have the few to make
a pleasure ground of these acres, while the many have nowhere to lay
their heads, crouching under stiles and bridges, clothed in rags, and
feeding on sea-weed with no hope, in the slowly passing years, of any
change for the better? The despair stamped on every brow told the sad
story of their wrongs. Those accustomed to such everyday experiences
brush beggars aside as they would so many flies, but those to whom such
sights are new cannot so easily quiet their own consciences. Everyone in
the full enjoyment of all the blessings of life, in his normal
condition, feels some individual responsibility for the poverty of
others. When the sympathies are not blunted by any false philosophy, one
feels reproached by one's own abundance. I once heard a young girl,
about to take her summer outing, when asked by her grandmother if she
had all the d