The place will doubtless be tidied, the nettles mowed down and pathways made, when the people get Home Rule. They are clearly waiting for something. They wish to be freed from the cruel English yoke. When this operation is happily effected, they will clean their houses, move the dunghills from their doors, wash themselves, and go to work in earnest. The Spanish Queen vowed she would never wash herself till Gibraltar was retaken from the English. Seven hundred years ago the Irish nation must have made a similar vow--and kept it. A passing shower drove me to the shelter of a neighbouring farmhouse, where lived a farmer, his wife, and their son and daughter. The place was poor but tolerable, the wife being far above the Irish average. The living room, about ten feet square, was paved with irregularly-shaped stones of all sizes, not particularly flat, but in places decidedly humpy; the interstices were of earth, the whole swept fairly clean, but certainly not scrubbed. The rafters, of rough wood, were painted black, and a rough ladder-like stair, open at the sides, led to the upper regions. To have an upstairs is to be an aristocrat. The standard of luxury is much lower than in England, for almost any English agricultural labourer would have better furniture than that possessed by this well-to-do but discontented farmer. An oak cupboard like a wardrobe, a round deal table, and four rough rush-bottomed chairs of unstained wood comprised the paraphernalia. The kitchen dresser, that indispensable requisite of English farm kitchens, with its rows of plates and dishes, was nowhere to be seen. The turf fire on the hearth needed no stove nor grate, nor was there any in the house. A second room on the ground floor, used as a bed room, had a boarded floor, and although to English notions bare and bald, having no carpet, pictures, dressing table, or washstand, it was clean and inoffensive. The churning and dairy operations are carried on in the room first described, where also the ducks and hens do feed. The farmer holds fifty acres of good land, for which he pays fifty pounds a year. His father, who died thirty years ago, paid twenty-four pounds, which he thinks a fair rent to-day. Has not made application to the Court, although he _might_ benefit by twenty-five to thirty-five per cent. Is aware that the Judicial Rent is sometimes fixed at a sum above what the tenant had been paying, and admits that this might happen to him. "Yes, the land round the house is very good, very good indeed, but what can be seen from here is by far the best of it. That is always the way in this world, the best at the front." From this and other remarks of like tendency I gather that the noble landlord is in the habit of placing all the best land of his estate along the high read, concealing the boggy, rocky portions in the remote interior, fraudulently imposing on the public, and alienating sympathy from the tenant, thereby inflicting another injustice on Ireland.