The people have changed very little in themselves since Lever wrote of them: where food has always been too scarce, as at the extremity of the Mullet peninsula curving about Blacksod Bay, famine and famine fever have weakened the stock terribly, and in such places you can see that looped and windowed raggedness and that squalor of hovels which go to make up the Englishman's conception of the sister island. But you can see also in markets in north Mayo many a handsome old man, springy and active even in his extreme age, who wears the blue tail coat, with its complement of brass buttons, which perhaps his father handed down to him--and a fine figure he makes in it, especially if he still keeps to the tight knee breeches and buckled shoes which were universal in his boyhood. Here and there, too, the ancient beaver hat with its long nap still lingers: such things must be almost indestructible. A few years ago the beautiful ruin of Ross Errilly Abbey near Headford was guarded by an old peasant in this headgear; corduroy breeches and gaiters completed the picture. But on the whole, Connaught--more's the pity--is trouser-wearing like the rest of Europe: yet for all that the Connaught-man remains distinctive. Smooth-tongued you will find them: supple you may think them: but the fire which kindles in Connaught is no flicker. Michael Davitt was born in a Mayo peasant's cabin, his earliest memory the eviction which drove him and his adrift on the world. He died in early middle age, yet before he died, what he himself called the Fall of Feudalism was accomplished: he himself, more than any other man, had destroyed the old order under which such eviction was the universal terror hanging over every peasant's head. Lord MacDonnell of Swinford was a poor man's son in Connaught, his parents hardly rich enough to equip him for the priesthood. He got an even cheaper education at the Queen's College in Galway, won his place in the Indian Civil Service, and there proved himself a governor as imperious and as capable and as beneficent as India had known since the Lawrences. It is a poor province, but it breeds notable men. I sat at dinner not long ago with three who had been at school together in the west, poor lads all of them. One had become bishop of his diocese; one was the best-known journalist in England and no mean force in politics; the third, perhaps, the greatest orator in America, something of a party to himself--but beyond all doubt a power. [Illustration: LOWLANDS, BALLINLOUGH, ROSCOMMON]