_Saturday, Feb. 25._--I had an interesting talk this morning at the County Club with a gentleman from Limerick on the subject of "boycotting." I told him what I had seen at Edenvale of the practice as applied to a forlorn and helpless old woman, for the crime of standing by her "boycotted" son. "You think this an extreme case," he said, "but you are quite mistaken. It is a typical case certainly, but it gives you only an inadequate idea of the scope given to this infernal machinery. The 'boycott' is now used in Ireland as the Inquisition was used in Spain,--to stifle freedom of thought and action. It is to-day the chief reliance of the National League for keeping up its membership, and squeezing subscriptions out of the people. If you want proof of this," he added, "ask any Nationalist you know whether members of the League in the country allow farmers who are not members to associate with them in any way. I can cite you a case at Ballingarry, in my county, where last summer a resolution of the League was published and put on the Chapel door, that members of the National League were thenceforth to have no dealings or communication with any person not a member. This I saw with my own eyes, and it was matter of public notoriety." I lunched at the City Club with Mr. M'Carthy. Sir Daniel O'Sullivan, formerly Mayor of Cork, whose views of Home Rule seem to differ widely from those of his successor, now incarcerated here, was one of the company. In the course of an animated but perfectly good-natured discussion of the Land Law question between two other gentlemen present, one of them, a strong Nationalist, smote his Unionist opponent very neatly under the fifth rib. The latter contending that it was monstrous to interfere by law with the principle of freedom of contract, the Nationalist responded, "That cannot be; it must be right and legitimate to do it, for the Imperial Parliament has done it four times within seventeen years!" I walked with Mr. M'Carthy to his apartments, where he showed me many curious papers and volumes bearing on municipal law and municipal history in Ireland. Among these, two most elaborate and interesting volumes, being the Council Books of Cork, Youghal, and Kinsale, from 1610 to 1659, 1666 to 1687, and 1690 to 1800. The records for the years not enumerated have perished, that is, for the first five or six years after the Restoration, and for the years just preceding and just following the fall of James II. These volumes take one back to the condition of Southern Ireland immediately after English greed and intrigue had sapped the foundations of the peace which followed the submission of the great Earl of Tyrone, and brought about the flight to the Continent of that chieftain, and of his friend and ally, the Earl of Tyrconnell.