A design was taken from one of the booths, presenting ingeniously an outside and an inside view of the same place an artifice seldom practised in pictures. sonal strength was at hand to give help. Thim's the afficers," said the carman, as the tandem wheeled by, a small groom quivering on behind and the carman spoke with the greatest respect this time. Two days before, on arriving at Westport, I had seen the same equipage at the door of the inn-where for a moment there happened to be no waiter to receive me. So, shouldering a carpetbag, I walked into the inn-hall, and asked a gentleman standing there where was the coffee-room? It was the military tandem-driving youth, who with much grace looked up in my face, and said calmly, “I dawnt knaw." I believe the little creature had just been dining in the very room - and so present my best compliments to him. The Guide-book will inform the traveller of many a beautiful spot which lies in the neighborhood of Westport, and which I had not the time to visit; but I must not take leave of the excellent little inn with Meanwhile, high up on the invisible mountain, the people were dragging their bleeding knees from altar to altar, flinging stones, and muttering some endless litanies, with the priests standing by. I think I was not sorry that the rain, and the care of my precious health, prevented me from mounting a severe hill to witness a sight that could only have caused one to be shocked and ashamed that servants of God should encourage it. The road home was very pleasant; everybody was wet through, but everybody was happy, and by some miracle we were seven on the car. There was the honest Englishman in the military cap, who sang "The sea, the hopen sea's my 'ome," although not any one of the company called upon him for that air. Then the music was taken up by a goodnatured lass from Castlebar; then the Englishman again, “With bur-out speaking once more of its exnished brand and musketoon;" and there was no end of pushing, pinching, squeezing, and laughing. The Englishman, especially, had a favorite yell, with which he saluted and aston-place, so beautiful is it, and so unished all cottagers, passengers, cars, that we met or overtook. Presently came prancing by two dandies, who were especially frightened by the noise. "Thim's two tailors from Westport," said the carman, grinning with all his might. "Come, gat out of the way there, gat along!" | piped a small English voice from above somewhere. I looked up, and saw a little creature perched on the top of a tandem, which he was driving with the most knowing air- -a dreadful young hero, with a white hat, and a white face, and a blue bird's-eye neckcloth. He was five feet high, if an inch, an ensign, and sixteen; and it was a great comfort to think, in case of danger or riot, that one of his years and per treme comfort; nor of the place itself, without another parting word regarding its beauty. It forms an event in one's life to have seen that like all other beauties that I know of. Were such beauties lying upon English shores it would be a world's wonder: perhaps, if it were on the Mediterranean, or the Baltic, English travellers would flock to it by hundreds; why not come and see it in Ireland! Remote as the spot is, Westport is only two days' journey from London now, and lies in a country far more strange to most travellers than France or Germany can be. CHAPTER XXII. FROM WESTPORT TO BALLINASLOE. THE mail-coach took us next day by Castlebar and Tuam to Ballinas loe, a journey of near eighty miles. The country is interspersed with innumerable seats belonging to the Blakes, the Browns, and the Lynches; and we passed many large domains belonging to bankrupt lords and fugitive squires, with fine lodges adorned with moss and battered windows, and parks where, if the grass was growing on the roads, on the other hand the trees had been weeded out of the grass. About these seats and their owners the guard an honest, shrewd fellow - had all the gossip to tell. The jolly guard himself was a ruin, it turned out: he told me his grandfather was a man of large property; his father, he said, kept a pack of hounds, and had spent every thing by the time he, the guard, was sixteen: so the lad made interest to get a mail-car to drive, whence he had been promoted to the guard's seat, and now for forty years had occupied it, travelling eighty miles, and earning seven and twopence every day of his life. He had been once ill, he said, for three days; and if a man may be judged by ten hours' talk with him, there were few more shrewd, resolute, simple-minded men to be found on the outside of any coaches or the inside of any houses in Ireland. During the first five and twenty miles of the journey, for the day was very sunny and bright, Croaghpatrick kept us company; and, seated with your back to the horses, you could see, "on the left, that vast aggregation of mountains which stretches southwards to the Bay of Galway; on the right, that gigantic assemblage which sweeps in circular outline northward to Killule." Somewhere amongst those hills the great John Tuam was born, whose mansion and cathedral are to be seen in Tuam town, but whose fame is spread everywhere. To arrive at Castlebar, we go over the undulating valley which lies between the mountains of Joyce country and Erris; and the first you see on entering the town is a stately Gothic castle that stands at a short distance from it. 66 WITHOUT BE On the gate of the stately Gothic castle was written an inscription not very hospitable: WARE, WITHIN AMEND; - just beneath which is an iron crane of neat construction. The castle is the county jail, and the iron crane is the gallows of the district. The town seems neat and lively: there is a fine church, a grand barracks (celebrated as the residence of the young fellow with the bird's-eye neckcloth), a club, and a Whig and Tory newspaper. The road hence to Tuam is very pretty and lively, from the number of country seats along the way, giving comfortable shelter to more Blakes, Browns, and Lynches. can In the cottages, the inhabitants looked healthy and rosy in their rags, and the cots themselves in the sunshine almost comfortable. After a couple of months in the country, the stranger's eye grows somewhat accustomed to the rags: they do not frighten him as at first; the people who wear them look for the most part healthy enough: especially the small children those who scarcely totter, and are sitting shading their eyes at the door, and leaving the unfinished dirt-pie to shout as the coach passes by healthy a looking race as one will often see. Nor can any one pass through the land without being touched by the extreme love of children among the people they swarm everywhere, and the whole country rings with cries of affection towards the children, with the songs of young ragged nurses dandling babies on their knees, and warnings of mothers to Patsey to come out of the mud, or Norey to get off the pig's back. are as At Tuam the coach stopped exactly for fourteen minutes and a half, during which time those who wished might dine: but instead, I had the pleasure of inspecting a very mouldy, objects which | dirty town, and made my way to the There is no object of special mark upon the road from Tuam to Ballinasloe- the country being flat for the most part, and the noble Galway and Mayo mountains having disappeared at length- until you come to a glimpse of Old England in the pretty village of Ahascragh. An old oaktree grows in the neat street, the houses are as trim and white as eye can desire, and about the church and the town are handsome plantations, forming on the whole such a picture of comfort and plenty as is rarely to be seen in the part of Ireland I have traversed. All these wonders have been wrought by the activity of an excellent resident agent. There was a countryman on the coach deploring that, through family circumstances, this gentleman should have been dispossesed of his agency, and declaring that the village had already begun to deteriorate in consequence. The marks of such decays were not, however, visible—at least to a newcomer; and, being reminded of it, I indulged in many patriotic longings for England: as every Englishman does when he is travelling out of the country which he is always so willing to quit. Catholic cathedral — a very hand- | lords, but make sham ones of their some edifice indeed; handsome with- own to admire them? out and within, and of the Gothic sort. Over the door is a huge coat of arms surmounted by a cardinal's hat-the arms of the see, no doubt, quartered with John Tuam's own patrimonial coat; and that was a frieze coat, from all accounts, passably ragged at the elbows. Well, he must be a poor wag who could sneer at an old coat, because it was old and poor; but if a man changes it for a tawdry gimcrack suit bedizened with twopenny tinsel, and struts about calling himself his grace and my lord, when may we laugh if not then? There is something simple in the way in which these good people belord their clergymen, and respect titles real or sham. Take any Dublin paper, -a couple of columns of it are sure to be filled with movements of the small great men of the world. Accounts from Derrynane state that the "Right Honorable the Lord Mayor is in good health - his lordship went out with his beagles yesterday; or "his Grace the Most Reverend the Lord Archbishop of Ballywhack, assisted by the Right Reverend the Lord Bishops of Trincomalee and Hippopotamus, assisted," &c.; or "Colonel Tims, of Castle Tims, and lady, have quitted the 'Shelburne Hotel,' with a party for Kilballybathershins, where the august* party propose to enjoy a few days' shrimp-fishing and so on. Our people are not witty and keen of perceiving the ridiculous, like the Irish; but the bluntness and honesty of the English have wellnigh kicked the fashionable humbug down; and except perhaps among footmen and about Baker Street, this curiosity about the aristocracy is wearing fast away. Have the Irish so much reason to respect their lords that they should so chronicle all their movements; and not only admire real That a place should instantly begin to deteriorate because a certain individual was removed from it- that cottagers should become thriftless, and houses dirty, and house-windows cracked, all these are points which public economists may ruminate over, and can't fail to give the carelessest traveller much matter for painful reflection. How is it that the presence of one man more or less should affect a set of people come to years of manhood, and knowing that they have their duty to do? Why should a man at Ahascragh let his home go to ruin, and stuff his windows with ragged breeches instead of glass, of Mr. Jones? Is he a child, that because Mr. Smith is agent in place won't work unless the schoolmaster be at hand? or are we to suppose, with the "Repealers," that the cause of all this degradation and misery is the intolerable tyranny of the sister country, and the pain which poor Ireland has been made to endure? This is very well at the Corn Exchange, and among patriots after dinner; but, after all, granting the grievance of the franchise (though it may not be unfair to presume that a man who has not strength of mind enough to mend his own breeches or his own windows will always be the tool of one party or another), there is no Inquisition set up in the country: the law tries to defend the people as much as they will allow; the odious tithe has even been whisked off from their shoulders to the landlords'; they may live pretty much as they like. Is it not too monstrous to howl about English tyranny and suffering Ireland, and call for a Stephen's Green Parliament to make the country quiet and the people industrious? The people are not politically worse treated than their neighbors in England. The priests and the landlords, if they chose to co-operate, might do more for the country now than any kings or laws could. What you want here is not a Catholic or Protestant party, but an Irish party. In the midst of these reflections, and by what the reader will doubtless think a blessed interruption, we came in sight of the town of Ballinasloe and its "gash-lamps," which a fellowpassenger did not fail to point out with admiration. The road-menders, however, did not appear to think that light was by any means necessary: for, having been occupied, in the morning, in digging a fine hole upon the highway, previous to some alterations to be effected there, they had left their work at sun-down, without any lamp to warn coming travellers of the hole-which we only escaped by a wonder. The papers have much such another story. In the Galway and Ballinasloe coach a horse on the road suddenly fell down and died; the coachman drove his coach unicornfashion into town; and, as for the dead horse, of course he left it on the road at the place where it fell, and where another coach coming up was upset over it, bones broken, passengers maimed, coach smashed. By heavens! the tyranny of England is unendurable; and I have no doubt it had a hand in upsetting that coach. CHAPTER XXIII. BALLINASLOE TO DUBLIN. DURING the cattle-fair the celebrated town of Ballinasloe is thronged with farmers from all parts of the kingdom - the cattle being picturesquely exhibited in the park of the noble proprietor of the town, Lord Clancarty. As it was not fair-time the town did not seem particularly busy, nor was there much to remark in it, except a church, and a magnificent lunatic asylum, that lies outside the town on the Dublin road, and is as handsome and stately as a palace. I think the beggars were more plenteous and more loathsome here than almost anywhere. To one hideous wretch I was obliged to give money to go away, which he did for a moment, only to obtrude his horrible face directly afterwards half eaten away with disease. "A penny for the sake of poor little Mery," said another woman, who had a baby sleeping on her withered breast; and how can any one who has a little Mery at home resist such an appeal? "Pity the poor blind man!" roared a respectably dressed grenadier of a fellow. I told him to go to the gentleman with a red neckcloth and fur cap (a young buck from Trinity College). -to whom the blind man with much simplicity immediately stepped over; and as for the rest of the beggars, what pen or pencil could describe their hideous leering flattery, their cringing, swindling humor! The inn, like the town, being made the careless drinking squire - the Irish Will Whimble. Sir," says he," as I was telling you before this gentleman came in (from Westport, I preshume, sir, by the mail? and my service to you!), the butchers in Tchume (Tuam) — where I live, and shall be happy to see you and give you a shakedown, a cut of mutton, and the use of as good a brace of pointers as ever you shot over- the butchers say to me, whenever I look in at their shops and ask for a joint of meat- they say: 'Take down that quarther o' mutton, boy; IT'S NO USE WEIGHING IT for Mr. Bodkin. He can tell with an eye what's the weight of it to an ounce! And so, sir, I can; and I'd make a bet to go into any market in Dublin, Tchume, Ballinasloe, where you please, and just by looking at the meat decide its weight." to accommodate the periodical crowds | novels As I don't know the gentleman's name, and as it is not at all improbable, from the situation in which he was, that he has quite forgotten the night's conversation, I hope there will be no breach of confidence in recalling some part of it. The speaker was dressed in deep black- worn, however, with that dégagé air peculiar to the votaries of Bacchus, or that nameless god, offspring of Bacchus and Ceres, who may have invented the noble liquor called whiskey. It was fine to see the easy folds in which his neckcloth confined a shirt-collar moist with the generous drops that trickled from the chin above, its little percentage upon the punch. There was a fine dashing black-satin waistcoat that called for its share, and generously disdained to be buttoned. I think this is the only specimen I have seen yet of the personage still so frequently described in the Irish At the pause, during which the gentleman here designated Bodkin drank off his "materials," the young officer said gravely that this was a very rare and valuable accomplishment, and thanked him for the invitation to Tchume. The honest gentleman proceeded with his personal memoirs; and (with a charming modesty that authenticated his tale, while it interested his hearers for the teller) he called for a fresh tumbler, and began discoursing about horses. "Them I don't know," says he, confessing the fact at once; For, if I do, I've been always so unlucky with them that it's as good as if I didn't. "To give you an idea of my ill-fortune: Me brother-'n-law Burke once sent me three colts of his to sell at this very fair of Ballinasloe, and for all I could do I could only get a bid for one of 'em, and sold her for sixteen pounds. And d'ye know what that mare was, sir?" says Mr. Bodkin, giving a thump that made the spoon jump out of the punch-glass for fright. "D'ye know who she was? she was Water-Wagtail, sir, WATER-WAGTAIL! She won four |