understand me; at last they found that they could, and they succeeded in making an illegal Gaelic bargain for oysters. Lack of coin sharpens wits. A friendless Irishman, as the story goes, found himself alone in New York. He got a basket and bawled out,' Who'll buy Carlingford oysters?' He gathered a crowd of his countrymen, and he was friendless no more. My poaching friends said that many people amongst their hills knew Gaelic ballads and stories, especially a certain packman; but I had no time to cross the loch and seek them. In the Mourne Mountains nobody speaks Gaelic. The dialect is broad Scotch, with a very strong Lowland accent. 'Are you a Scotchman or an Irishman?' I said to a beggar. 'I'm a Catholic,' he replied. I found a great glacial boulder far up in a solitary glen with a legend inscribed thereon. It was, 'To Hell the Pope.' Amongst such active polemics I found no traditions, although still many traces of a departed race.

At Emania (near Armagh), the ancient domain of kings, celebrated in the tragic tale of Deirdre, I heard nothing of tradition; but a Kerry woman, who peeped into Leabhar na Feinne, in the house of Dr. Reeves, at Armagh, was found ejaculating with delight over 'The Battle of Ventry Harbour,' which she hit upon.

Amongst the Antrim hills men speak the very broadest of broad Scotch. On the way to Red Bay I managed to find out some old people who still speak Gaelic. Jenny Mac Callum, one of these, spoke the Argyleshire dialect with certain forms which occur in old ballads, and with a new kind of brogue. When these old people, who have never been out of their native glens, spoke English, their accent was that Highland twang familiar to my ear from childhood. These knew something about Ursgeul' and some heroic

names, but I got little out of them. The strange thing about these Saxon Antrim people is that they have forgotten the plantation of Ulster, without learning the traditions of Ireland, while they do remember some old British folk-lore. I tried every name I knew with one man, and got no rise till I named King Arthur and Robin Hood. He knew about them.

'Do you speak Irish?' I said to a polite farmer. 'Od, man,' said this Irishman, 'gin a body was to speak Irish till huz, we wad jeest lach at him. Folks comes here askin me whaur St. Patrick herded the swine. I jeest tell them that I dinna ken.' 'You must be a Scotchman,' I said. 'Na,' said he, 'I'm an Irishman, and my fethers and my forebears dwalt here. What may your name be?' he asked. 'Weel bruik your

name,' he said, when he heard it.

At Coshendal on Red Bay I went to an old dame who keeps a whisky shop, and listened to her and her customers, and understood them. A man named Macdonald told me that his ancestors and most of the people about came over from Scotland with Colla Ciotach, and that many of them are left-handed still. Coll was hanged by order of the Marquis of Argyll, who was indicted for the deed, amongst others, and was beheaded 1660.

Farther west, opposite to Ceantire, I conversed with men by the wayside in Gaelic as freely as I conversed in English with those Irishmen who spoke Lowland Scotch.

In Rathlin they speak Argyllshire Gaelic with its accent, but use some different forms.

On the other side of Ulster, at Ballyshannon, I got people to tell me stories about Diarmaid and Graidhne. On the south of Donegal Bay runs a range of scarped hills, and high up in the face of a cliff is a cave which is called' Leaba Dhiarmaid,' or, in English, 'Darby's Den.' This romance is very widely

known as tradition all over Gaelic countries. It is very old, and somewhat like the story of Lancelot and Arthur's Queen. Beinn Boolbin, a peak 2,000 feet high, is said to be the Beinn Gulbin of the ballad. The topography of the head of Donegal Bay fits ballad topography better than any place I know. The great salmon fall at Ballyshannon is the place so often mentioned in ballads. The iron horse has taken the road which Caoilte and Fionn took when they chased the old Norse witch who stole the cup and leaped the river at Eas Ruagh; and that same track must have been followed by marauding bands in real wars of old. The small harbour has the bearings given in ballads which describe the arrival of mysterious people from the western sea at Eas Ruagh of the sheltered streams.

To the north of Donegal Bay, about Glencolumkill, is a district where Gaelic is the common speech of people whose manners and customs are identical with Hebridian ways. There I was able to converse with boatmen, and there I found a man digging in a potato field, who then and there recited a genuine old Fenian ballad, which I have not got. Farther up in the same glen lives a girl who can recite 'Fianacha' for a whole evening. A schoolmaster of true Milesian descent, whose scholars run to school with peats under their arms for the fire, and who study from figures drawn upon the floor, was set to write; but after seven months nothing came of it. Farther north still, about Dunglow, I found a dialect which I could make out with some difficulty, and the usual traditions current amongst people who migrate yearly through Belfast and Londonderry in hordes to reap Lowland Scotch harvests. But here questions about the Feinne seemed to be understood as political, so little information was got.

In the neighbourhood of Letterkenny I heard people speaking Islay Gaelic with the familiar accent. I was told that these people live on points north of Loch Foyle, opposite to Islay. Tribes embarked from Islay for Ireland within historic times. Macdonald of the Isles was inaugurated in Islay. Macdonald's high seat, a rock with rude steps carved in it, is at Kilmacrenan, near Letterkenny, and there the chief of a tribe sat when he was crowned in Donegal.

The Scotch and Irish Gael of the West coasts from Cape Clear to Cape Wrath are the same people, with a common language, common traditions, and a common history; but, so far as I have been able to discover, traditions are best preserved in the Scotch islands, where the people have been least disturbed.

In Ireland, where any remnant of any dialect of Gaelic remains, there the popular Celtic heroes and their story are remembered in some shape. In Ireland and in Scotland I have found that dialects of English, and of Lowland Scotch, are not associated with traditions which purport to be Celtic history, or with any historical traditions like those which I have collected in such abundance. So much I found out; but was at disadvantage as а stranger suspected of being a Saxon with political designs. If any Irish collector will work, he may reap an Irish harvest of Gaelic traditions.

Vagrant creeds, which unbelievers call superstitions, abound in Ireland as in no other land known to me. Wells, lakes, hills, stones, holes, raths, cairns, mounds, thorn trees, briar bushes, and weeds, are sacred in regions, Catholic and Protestant, from North to South. Fairies are supposed to be domiciled in Ireland as thickly as men are, and to be everywhere able to punish those who dig down or uproot or disturb objects tabooed.

Lumbago, paralysis, and heaps of pains and aches, to which flesh is heir in damp regions, are attributed to fairy cantrips, which 'can be cured by spells. The Bishop of Limerick gave me a book of Irish charms, written in Ogham by a fairy doctor. They are chiefly short Christian prayers, to be used against these unchristian powers. To wells and lakes at opposite ends of Ireland pilgrims crowd even from America. I saw a barefooted old dame solemnly march thrice sunwise round one of a series of pillar-stones. She was unconsciously performing part of a Brahman rite as a Christian pilgrimage in a long circuit sunwise, which included the old idol forms of a pillar set up within a horseshoe mound of stones, of a pillar with a hole bored through it, and a well. These spots are consecrated to saints. Priests come and perform service there; crosses are carved upon the pillars, churches are beside the lakes, chapels by the wells and on the hill-tops. But most of the rites and ceremonies performed at these places are avowedly Pagan ceremonies, consecrated by early Christian missionaries in Ireland. 'The fairies' clearly are old heathen gods of hill and plain, and lake and river and well, and field and tree, and Christian prayers are fitly used to exorcise them and cure the evils which they are supposed to inflict upon frail humanity.

Standing at a place where Baal fires are lighted every year, in the midst of a great stone circle, upon a high point near the sea, with 'a boy' who would not answer questions or go away, I tried an experiment. I began to talk gravely about the fairies. The man doffed his cap and bowed his head as often as the

name was said. Thereupon I placed a clinometer upon a stone which may have been an altar or a grave, and began to chant the Lay of Diarmaid, and point at the horizon with a long hooked hazel shepherd's mountain stick. It looked like a Bachul, and was everywhere noticed and acknowledged to be sovereign against snakes. I gabbled Gaelic incantations from popular tales current in the islands, flourishing this magic wand till my attendant fled over the moss.

I often heard of outrages in Ireland; but as far as my experience went, a better bred set of mortals, or better behaved, I never met outside of Celtic bounds. It never once occurred to me, a solitary wanderer, that anybody wanted to hurt me, and nobody did. Only one man, who was very drunk, tried to insult me, and he failed. First, he took me for a Scotchman, and said argumentatively, with a Scotch accent, 'Do you mean to deny that the Irish taught the Scotch Gaelic?' I answered in Gaelic, and, as he had no Irish, he was enraged. Then he took me for a Saxon, and shouted, 'Do you mean to deny that the Scotch beat the English at Bannockburn six to one?"

'No,' I said, 'I deny nothing.' 'Then, sir, you are an atheist,' said my adversary.

'Ye are makin' a great fool o' yerself, Tim,' said a bystander. Go home.'

Thus I smoked the pipe of peace through Ireland for sixty-nine days, while a Yankee sergeant carried his flag unfurled through England, and one of my shipmates made an English progress in America; and this is what I noticed concerning tradition and dialects in Ireland in 1872.

such.

Let it, however, be said that, on asking half-a-dozen independent witnesses as to what was written in the first article, whether my description of the labourers' state had been considered by them correct, the reply of all was, quite true as regards the particular locality, but there are places and cases were things are not so good, in which the labourer's condition requires improvement. If so, my observation will not injure the peasant; by all means let him be raised up at least to such a condition. I have said what I have said, not to keep down wages, but to show how they may be raised. Another says, 'I am not in the ring, as I live in a town, and have no labourers, and I know nothing of the details or prices of labour; but surely the labourer ought not only to live, but to be in a position to save.' The question then comes, can the land be made productive enough to find the farmer and labourer a living on better prices? If not, can the labourer be migrated or emigrated? Or can the field labourer be turned into somebody else-into a bricklayer, carpenter, artizan, miner, &c. ? But though many lads are seeking to educate

The system of migration seems to have this error in it, that it is only a temporary expedient, and produces evils it seeks to cure. Let us see how this is. A is a village in Dorsetshire, with forty cottages; it takes about thirty-five men to do the work. Five are migrated into B, which is a parish in Warwickshire, at the expense of the funds which come out of the pockets of the forty. As soon as they are gone, five other families apply for the cottages. In the meantime fresh cottages will be built in Warwickshire to accommodate the new comers, and if there are forty families there where there should be only thirty-five, good places will be subject to greater competition. And after so many years the exodus must be south again, because population in the north keeps on increasing. Emigration has for its field a space, in lands of English language and Anglo-Saxon customs, illimitable at all events in the lifetime of the present generation. Any funds of the Union applied to keeping a good agency in all colonies would be well spent.

Another man writes:

Your facts seem honestly given and clearly stated, and the conclusion to be

come to seems evident. It is that small farmers will be driven out of the field, men of brains and capital will come more to the front. As little human labour as chinery as possible. Then, if it is not pospossible, but better paid, and as much masible with high rents to give human beings fair and honourable wages, land will have to go down from its present high price.'

This seems a logical sequence of ideas which works itself out in this and in no other way. But it must be remembered how small a portion of a tenant's outlay is for rent, that is to say, considering that rent is the payment of interest for the purchase of freehold land, the remuneration to a landlord who has spent his fortune in land, and who is to keep up and supply buildings, and stand in many cases the mutation of tenants. If you consider the other expenses of tithes and taxes, including a School Board rate, they amount to a sum perfectly out of proportion to rent. Wages also amount to a sum on holdings all arable, as has been shown, out of all proportion to rent; so that it wages are raised ten per cent. and ten per cent. taken off rent, we shall only be where we stand.

Another person very justly, by way of criticism, says: "You have not yet contrasted the labourer in the country with the labourer in the town; this contrast would help to bring out his true position.'

It is wonderful, certainly, that more is not said about the ills of the inmate of the back streets and alleys of towns. Surely the person who is so much before the public now is better off than the townsman, taking people in a parallel line of

life.

one

The townsman, perhaps, may boast of pieces of fresh meat which sees displayed in butchers' windows on Saturday night, which he stews up with vegetables; he may get also cheap fish, and so may vary his meal. The labouring man in a village does not get these changes of diet, not so much because he cannot afford them, as because such things not being brought round, he has not ready access to them. Against this the labourer has his home-cured bacon and homefed pork, also his home-baked loaf, and the produce of his garden. know, if both asked me to dine with them, which invitation I should

I

accept. I do not mean to say that every labourer has his pig hung up, but if the public house was left alone, I believe no one in full work need be without it. The cottage of the labourer, bad as it may sometimes be, will contrast favourably with the house in the back streets of a town, and something must be allowed for fresh air and ozone. We used to hear that the labouring man never got milk for his children, and the world cried shame! But when the Chipping Norton women got only half a pint of new milk twice a day for their infants, they said It was short commons; they had more at home.' How was that? I have, as guardian in a Union which has some town and some country parishes, noticed the applicants for relief in each case; and the sturdy, warm clothed peasant contrasts favourably in stamina and appearance with the weakly, thin clad denizen of the town. I am speaking of a part of Hampshire where the wages are nominally twelve shillings -carters and shepherds twelve and a house, but in which with extra task work and other things, the money payment is sixteen shillings. This is about what the Union aims at, they say fifteen or sixteen shillings is the sum to which ultimately they aim to put up wages in the southern counties. A porter on the Underground Railway has 188. a week, and 5s. to pay for house rent. Is not he much worse off than the farm labourer?

There is always something fresh in the way Lord Derby puts forth old truths. He spoke at Willis's Rooms in May, on thrift. Defoe, two hundred years ago, spoke of good husbandry as no English virtue, and says an Englishman on il. a week will live on the same sum a Dutchman will grow rich, and then, moralizing on this, Lord Derby says:

I am a great believer in the permanency of the types of national character. Eng