No doubt there will be some alteration after a few days’ voyage. But it is evident that the Queen’s administration keeps a sharp eye upon the emigration companies, and sees that all sanitary prescriptions are observed. One sees no longer now-a-days such scandalous spectacles as occurred in the years of the famine, when thousands of Irish were promiscuously heaped in the hold of _coffin-ships_, and died by hundreds before reaching the goal. Emigration is now one of the normal, it may be said one of the official, functions of social life in Ireland—a function which has its organs, laws, customs, and even its record-office. The companies keep their agents in all British possessions; they are informed of all the wants of those colonies; they know what specialists are in demand, what advantages are offered to the new-comer. They do their best to make the offer fit with the demand, and they seem to succeed. An old boatswain on board one of the emigrant ships tells me that life there is generally monotonous but quiet. The passengers do not mix or associate as quickly as one could imagine. Each of them pitches his own separate camp on the few square feet that chance gives him, and it is only after eight or ten days’ voyage that they begin to club together. The mothers tend their babies, the fathers smoke their pipes, the children play, the young people flirt. It appears that a relatively considerable number of marriages are prepared and even concluded in the crossing. There is nothing surprising in that, if we remember that the most numerous class of emigrants is composed of marriageable girls and men between twenty and twenty-five years of age. * * * * * A few types of emigrants taken at the inns and public-houses on the quays. _John Moriarty_, of Ballinakilla, County Cork, 45 to 50 years old. A rural Micawber, dressed in a dilapidated black coat, a pair of green trousers, completely worn out at the knees, and crushed hat. A Catholic (he says _Cathioulic_). Squats with wife and children in a single room, almost devoid of furniture. Was to have embarked five days ago for Canada. The Board of Health did not allow it on account of one of the children having got the measles (an illness which assumes in Great Britain a most dangerous and infectious character). Makes no difficulty to tell me his whole history. Had a farm of thirteen acres. Was thriving more or less—rather less than more. But for the last seven years it has been an impossibility for him to make both ends meet. Strange as it may appear, the man is a Conservative in feeling. “Nothing to do in the country, with those _mob laws_ and agitation!” says he. “What mob laws?” “Well, the trash on fixity of tenure, fair rent and the rest.” “I thought they were favourable to the tenant.”