In connection with Colonel Turner's statements as to the conduct of Father White at Milltown Malbay, and with the accounts given me of the conduct of Father Sheehan at Lixnaw, this side-light upon the relations of a certain class of the Irish clergy with the most violent henchmen of the League, is certainly noteworthy. I happen to have had some correspondence with friends of mine in Paris, who are friends also of M. de Mandat Grarncey, about his visit to Ireland before he made it, and I am quite certain that he went there, to put the case mildly, with no prejudices in favour of the English Government or against the Nationalists. Perhaps the extreme bitterness shown in the pamphlet of the "Canadian priest" may have been born of his disgust at finding that the sympathy of French Catholics with Catholic Ireland draws the line at priests who regard the assassination of "bailiffs and tax-collectors" as a pardonable, if not positively amusing, excess of patriotic zeal. It was late when I reached Parsonstown, known of old in Irish story as Birr, from St. Brendan's Abbey of Biorra, and now a clean prosperous place, carefully looked after by the chief landlord of the region, the Earl of Rosse, who, while he inherits the astronomical tastes and the mathematical ability of his father, is not so absorbed in star-gazing as to be indifferent to his terrestrial duties and obligations. I have heard nothing but good of him, and of his management of his estates, from men of the most diverse political views. But I think it more important to get a look at the Clanricarde property, about which I have heard little but evil from anybody. The strongest point I have heard made in favour of the owner is, that he is habitually described by that dumb organ of a down-trodden people, _United Ireland_, as "the most vile Clanricarde." I found a good car at the railway station, and set off at once for Portumna. Parsonstown was called by Sir William Petty, in his _Survey of Ireland_, the _umbilicus Hiberniæ_. It is the centre of Ireland, as a point near Newnham Paddox is of England, and the famous or infamous "Bog of Allan" stretches hence to Athlone. Our way fortunately took us westward. A light railway was laid down some years ago from Parsonstown to Portumna, but it did not pay, and it has now been abandoned. "What has become of the road?" I asked my jarvey. "Oh! they just take up the rails when they like, the people do." "And what do they do with them?" "Is it what they do with them? Oh; they make fences of them for the beasts." He was a dry, shrewd old fellow, not very amiably disposed, I was sorry to find, towards my own country. "Ah! it's America, sorr, that's been the ruin of us entirely." "Pray, how is that?" "It's the storms they send; and then the grain; and now they tell me it's the American beasts that's spoiling the market altogether for Ireland." "Is that what your member tells you?" "The member, sorr? which member?"