Ireland and exports a great deal of butter to London. [Illustration: QUEEN'S COLLEGE, CORK] There are several Catholic seminaries and convents and Protestant boarding-schools for boys and girls and preparatory institutions of various grades attended by children from all parts of southern Ireland, which make Cork an educational center. There is a handsome library presented by Mr. Carnegie, adjoining the City Hall, with twelve thousand volumes and about three thousand ticket-holders, who, according to the report of the librarian, borrowed 85,406 books last year, of which 63,902 were works of fiction. There is another library belonging to a chartered association that is available only to its members. There is an opera-house and several theatres, and all the advantages and attractions that one would expect in a city of this size, with a race course of two hundred and forty acres on the banks of the river, just outside the city limits. There is an attractive promenade, a mile long, called the Mardyke, sheltered by splendid old trees which form a natural arch overhead, which was fashionable for gossip and flirtation as long ago as 1720, but is now given up chiefly to servant girls and their lovers and nurses and children. The birds sing more sweetly in Cork than any place we have been, or perhaps we have noticed them more readily than we have done elsewhere. Irish birds are as cheerful and happy as Irish people. When we were wandering through the campus of Queen's College, just after a shower, the trees were alive with larks and thrushes. They had come out of their hiding places and were bursting with song. I met an old woman, bent and gaunt and gray, with bright blue eyes and a canny expression, and asked her the way to the house I was seeking. She answered with politeness, and I gave her a penny. "God welcome you to Ireland," she said. "An' may yer honor's visit be prosperous. Yer honor is from America. I kin tell that by yer fine looks and yer fine manners, and I've a son over there meself. I'm nothin' but a poor widdy on the edge of the grave, or I'd be follering him there at all, at all." And it is astonishing how many people we meet here, who have sons and brothers and sisters in the United States. Most of them seem to be in Chicago, Boston, and Brooklyn. Even a rosy-cheeked little newsboy from whom I bought a paper on the street recognized my nationality and remarked, "An' I've a brother in Brooklyn, meself, sor." At least one-fourth of the population of Cork have emigrated to the United States since the census was taken in 1891, and more are going by every steamer.