pinion in the most vivid colours.

Ballinrobe is the centre of a by no means unprosperous part of
Ireland. Pretty homesteads are frequent, and well-furnished stackyards
refresh the eye wearied with looking upon want and desolation. Between
Ballinrobe and Hollymount the country is agreeably fertile; toward
Cong and Cloonbur, where Lord Mountmorres was shot, and in the
direction of Headford, on the Galway road, there is plenty of evidence
of prosperity. It is, however, precisely in the rich country lying
east of Lough Mask that the greatest disinclination to pay rent
prevails. Nowhere is the disaffected party more completely organized,
and nowhere is it, rightly or wrongly, thought that some of the
tenants could more easily pay up if they liked. As contrasted with
the hovels of the northern part of Mayo and the west of county
Galway, the houses at Ballinrobe are comfortable, and the people
apparently naturally well off. Moreover, they have a better idea of
what comfort is than the inhabitants of the seaboard. I cannot better
show this than by describing the houses in which I passed part, at
least, of the last two Sundays.

When I arrived at Ballinrobe on Wednesday last it was almost
impossible to obtain quarters either for love or money. I had
telegraphed beforehand to that most civil and obliging of
hotel-keepers, Mr. Valkenburgh, of Ballinrobe, to secure rooms for me
and send a car to Cong. The car came, and the driver with whom I had
the debate already recorded, but it had been impossible to obtain a
room for me anywhere. Mr. Valkenburgh's own house was crammed to the
roof with closely laid strata of guests, from the American reporter
under the roof to the cavalry officer in the front parlour. There was
nothing for it but to be bedded out--a severe infliction in some parts
of Ireland. The polite hotel-keeper finally bethought him that in the
house of a widow, who had only four officers of Hussars staying with
her, a stray corner could be found; and I was finally established in
the widow's drawing-room or best parlour, in which a cot, only a foot
too short for me, was placed.

The excellent woman, whose house was converted into military
quarters, is by no means rich. Her late husband was in the office of a
neighbouring landlord, and would appear to have been just getting on
in the world when he died. He certainly lived in a house properly so
called; not a house in the Irish meaning of the word, which includes a
Conn