beer-shop, you have less pauperism and crime, more honest, decent, sober living, than you have where these places are open. If this be true in England, where the people are more phlegmatic and less wild on politics and religion, it is trebly true of Ireland, where the people are supposed to be at all times too passionate and ready to take offence; where ages of political and religious partisanship have given to those passions an unnatural ferocity; and where the drop o’ drink seems to be especially potent in its working. I have travelled in most parts of England, Scotland, and Europe, but I never felt in the slightest peril from the character of my travelling companions. I have been very little in Ireland, but the most disagreeable journeys I ever made were on Irish railways. In each case the disagreeableness arose entirely from the extent to which my fellow-passengers had indulged in the national drink. Perhaps we get it adulterated in England. If so, we have reason to be thankful. Its effects on the Irish are, for the time, truly demoniacal. I have never seen people so maddened with drink as those of the sister isle. The temperate character of Bessbrook strikes you at once. There the difficult problem of carrying out a factory with the minimum of inevitable evil seems to have been satisfactorily solved. Where is Bessbrook? The answer is, you pass it as you travel by rail from Belfast to Dublin, a little more than fifty miles from the latter, a little more than thirty from the former place—close to the Newry station on the main line. By day and night it is visible, and testifies afar-off the industry of which it is the source and centre. About half a mile to your right you can just discern its lofty chimneys and gigantic works. By night the place looks like a palace of glass, as the cheerful light, eloquent of labour and capital and intelligence, shines out of its thousand windows. We get out of the train, and ascend the road on our right. If it be daytime we shall have a pleasant walk. Behind us is Newry, or rather the valley in which it is seated, where its merchants and tradesmen sell and buy and get gain; and the river with its ships, which trade to Liverpool and all parts of our English coast. On our left and right are mountains and hills, well planted with white cottages and farmers’ houses, which look smilingly at us in the morning sun. The interiors, we admit, may be capable of improvement. Many of them are of the rudest kind, with the bare earth for the floor, with stone walls, whose sides internally are black with the smoke of the peat fire, which is painfully manifested to the unaccustomed and curious stranger who inquires within. The inhabitants are all small farmers. They grow flax and potatoes, keep a cow or a goat, and poultry and pigs, the sale of which is their living. As for themselves, they never touch such delicacies, and live chiefly on potatoes and Indian meal. They are very dirty.