Some excellent stories were told in the picturesque smoking-room after dinner, one of a clever and humorous, sensible and non-political priest, who, being taken to task by some of his brethren for giving the cold shoulder to the Nationalist movement, excused himself by saying, "I should like to be a patriot; but I can't be. It's all along of the rheumatism which prevents me from lying out at nights in a ditch with a rifle." The same priest being reproached by others of the cloth with a fondness for the company of some of the resident landlords in his neighbourhood, replied, "It's in the blood, you see. My poor mother, God rest her soul! she always had a liking for the quality. As for my dear father, he was just a blundering peasant like the rest of ye!" GWEEDORE, _Saturday, 4th Feb._--A good day's work to-day! We left our hospitable friends at Sion House early in the morning. The sun was shining brightly; the air so soft and bland that the thrushes were singing like mad creatures in the trees and the shrubbery; and the sky was more blue than Italy. "A foine day it is, sorr," said our jarvey as we took our seats on the car. There is some point in the old Irish sarcasm that English travellers in Ireland only see one side of the country, because they travel through it on the outside car. But to make this point tell, four people must travel on the car. In that case they must sit two on a side, each pair facing one side only of the landscape. It is a very different business when you travel on an outside car alone, with the driver sitting on one side of it, or with one companion only, when the driver occupies the little perch in front between the sides of the car. When you travel thus, the outside car is the best thing in the world, after a good roadster, for taking you rapidly over a country, and enabling you to command all points of the horizon. Double up one leg on the seat, let the other dangle freely, using the step as a stirrup, and you go rattling along almost as if you were on horseback. We drove through a long suburb of Strabane into the busiest quarter of the busy little place. The names on the shops were predominantly Scotch--Maxwells, Stewarts, Hamiltons, Elliotts. I saw but one Celtic name, M'Ilhenny, and one German, Straub. I changed gold for enormous Bank of Ireland notes at a neat local bank, and the cheery landlord of the Abercorn Arms gave us a fresh car to take us on to Letterkenny, a drive of some twenty miles. The car came up like a small blizzard, flying about at the heels of an uncanny little grey mare. Lord Ernest knew the beast well, and said she was twenty-five years old. She behaved like an unbroken filly at first, but soon striking her pace, turned out a capital goer, and took us on without turning a hair till her work was done. The weather continued to be good, but clouds rolled up around the horizon.