The good humor was hearty rather than inventive or articulate, but one man had had the genius to invent a comic device. This was a very wild creature, half beggar, half laborer, the last of a rapidly dying class in Ireland. He had got hold of a wretched nag of whom the knacker had been defrauded for many years and seated on this in fantastic dress he cudgelled it unmercifully, amid screams of laughter, for around its neck was a placard with the words, "Dead Landlordism." About two o'clock, there was seen making a desperate attempt to penetrate through this teeming, densely-packed, and noisy multitude, a stout figure, with a face ugly, irregular, good-humored. He was dressed in a long and dull-colored and almost shabby ulster. His hat was as rough as if it had been brushed the wrong way, and he wore a suit of tweed that was now very old, but that even in its earliest days would have been scorned by the poorest shopman of the town with any pretensions to respectability, and the trousers were short and painfully bagged at the knees. But the divine light of genius shone from the brown eyes and the ample forehead. The enthusiasm of the multitude now knew no bounds. There was first a strange stillness, then, when the word seemed to have passed with a strange and lightning-like rapidity from mouth to mouth, there burst forth a great cheer, and it was known that Isaac Butt had come. But even the Irish leader was destined to play a subordinate part in the proceedings of this strange day. It was a local speaker that stirred the hearts of the people to the uttermost, for he told the story of the eviction of the Widow Cunningham, of the death of her husband, the exile of her son, the shame of her daughter.