* * * * * VALENTIA ISLAND. At Cahirciveen, I crossed the strait which divides the main land from the island of Valentia. This is the extreme point of the old continent, where the Transatlantic cables are placed. Good, honest, plucky fellows! what repose after the misery of Kerry! I am speaking of the fishermen of the island, a peculiar race who never ploughed any fields but those of the ocean. Every night they risk their lives on the giant billows, and earn their bread valiantly. They know nothing of sheep rot, potato disease, or landlordism; all they know is the management of their boats, the making and mending of their nets, and the art of making the deep yield food for their young. Strangers to the neighbouring world, they ignore even its language, and only talk the rude idiom of their ancestors, the Irish of the time of the O’Donoghue. Noble fellows! I shall not soon forget the night I spent there watching them as they were fishing between the Skellings, two enormous rocks that rise like Gothic cathedrals, about twelve miles from Bray Head, and on which the waves are eternally breaking with a thundering noise. My guide had warned me against offering them money; it would offend them, he said, so I did not do it. I simply drank with them a glass of whisky when they prepared to go home towards daybreak, the stars still shining. And, comparing their happy courage with the distress of Kerry, I wished them from the bottom of my heart never to become acquainted with agriculture on small holdings, under an English landlord. CHAPTER X. RURAL PHYSIOLOGY. We have glanced at a few facts presenting symptoms of the Irish disease, which were taken as chance guided us, in a ride through a south-western county. Similar symptoms are everywhere to be found through the island. To appreciate them at their right value, as even to comprehend them, it is essentially requisite to know, at least in its broader outlines, the physiology of landed property in this entirely agricultural country. Vast landed property and parcelled-out culture. This is the epitome of such a physiology. At the base of the social edifice we find the tenant, generally a Catholic and of indigenous race, occupying and cultivating after his own fashion the thousandth or ten thousandth part of a property ranging over an area of some hundred thousand acres. At the summit we find the landlord, almost invariably of English and Protestant race, ruling by right of primogeniture over this immense space. Does this right rest at its origin on confiscation and spoliation, as is averred by the Irish? That is of little importance from a legal point of view, for prescription has covered the spoliation by an occupation of two to eight centuries. It is of far greater importance from a moral point of view, because that grievance, ill or well founded, serves as a handle for all agrarian recriminations.