Athlone is one of the few towns--perhaps the only one--on the Shannon that is not decaying at present. For many years after the famine it decayed rapidly, but some thirty years ago a woollen factory was established; now there are two woollen factories and a saw-mill that give employment to some hundreds of hands, consequently Athlone has been saved from decay. But comparatively prosperous as it is, it is not one-fourth as prosperous as it ought to be considering its splendid situation and the fertility and beauty of the country that surrounds it. It has recently become a great railway centre; one can go by rail from Athlone to almost any part of Ireland. But all the railways and all the fertility of all the world cannot bring real prosperity to any country in which the population is declining. The decline of the population in Athlone itself and in the country surrounding it has, during the last fifty years, been something frightful, and can only be fully realised by those who remember what it was in former times. A market day in Athlone now is very different from a market day there half a century ago. The writer recollects having been at a market in Athlone when a small boy, about the year 1841 or '42, and saw more people there in one market than could be seen in twenty markets there now. The town was too small to contain much more than half of them; they flowed out into the fields surrounding it. The crowds in the streets were so dense that it would take hours to jostle one's way from one end of the town to the other, and, what will hardly be credited by those whose memories do not go back fifty years, there were certainly three persons speaking Irish for one who spoke English. One might attend markets in Athlone now every week in the year and not hear a word of any language but English. Irish has completely died out of the country surrounding Athlone, save in the south-western corner of the county Roscommon, where some old people still speak it. There is something inexpressibly sad in the fading away of any form of National speech, but, above all, in the fading away of a tongue so old and once so cultivated as Irish. It seems to forebode not only the death of all real National aspirations, but the death of heart and soul. It seems to show that Philistinism is rapidly driving away sentiment from the Irish people. But the life of the Irish peasant has been so long such a battle for mere existence that it is no wonder that he came to look with contempt on everything that did not administer to his mere animal wants. He is rapidly improving since he has had a barrier put between him and the generally cruel treatment he was wont to receive from his landlord. None but those who remember what his position was fifty years ago, and who see what it is now, can fully understand all the advance he has made. In spite of the awful decline of population in the rural districts of Ireland during the last fifty years, there is much to