The door stood wide open, but the cabin was warm and comfortable, and a peat fire smouldered, sending up, to me, most agreeable odours. An inner room seemed to be a sort of granary, full of hay and straw. There the cow is kept at night. "It's handy if you want a drink of milk," said the visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden houses of hundreds of struggling farmers in the older Eastern States. I am sure my old friend Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, who made the only thorough surveys of agricultural life in the United States before the Civil War, would have pronounced it in all respects superior, so far as health and comfort go, to the average home of the average "poor buccra," between the Chesapeake and the Sabine. I am afraid a great deal of not wholly innocuous nonsense has been written and spoken about this part of the United Kingdom by well-meaning philanthropists who have gauged the condition of the people here by their own standards of comfort and enjoyment. Most things in this life of ours are relative. I well remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compassion for a judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live "upon a pittance of eight thousand dollars a year." These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands of their own race in the slums of New York and Chicago and Liverpool and London. Mrs. M'Donnell's cousin, however, took dark views of things. The times "were no good at all." The potatoes, I had heard, were doing well this year. "No! they wouldn't keep the people; indeed, they wouldn't. There would have to be relief." "Why not manure the land?" "Manure? oh yes, the sea-stuff was good manure, but the people couldn't get it. They had no boats; and it cost eighteenpence a load to haul it from Bunbeg. No! they couldn't get it off the rocks. At the Rosses they might; the Rosses were not so badly off as Derrybeg or Gweedore, for all they might say." "But Father M'Fadden had urged me," I said, "to see the Rosses, because the people there were worse off than any of the people."