A few blocks away from St. Stephen's Green is another large park known as Merrion Square, which is a private inclosure like many of the small parks in the city of London, and is accessible only to the residents of the neighborhood, who, I understand, purchased the land and made it into a park two or three hundred years ago, so that the public has no rights there. Each of the leaseholders who are entitled to its privileges is required to pay $5 a year for maintaining it and "half a crown for a key to the gates," as I was informed by a policeman on that beat. It is a pretty place, with deep, lustrous turf such as you seldom see outside of the British Isles, and find in Ireland smoother and richer and greener than anywhere else. There are a pond and several tennis courts, cricket and croquet grounds, which are occupied every afternoon by the rich families in the neighborhood; and it makes you feel a little resentful to see the children of the poor, who need that breathing space more than the owners, peeking through between the iron pickets. It is said that this square plot of ground, which is equal to four ordinary squares in area, was formerly a pond, and that the Duke of Leinster in early days used to sail a boat upon it. But it was drained two hundred years ago or more, and the splendid great trees that are growing there now were then planted. Leinster House is in the neighborhood. The residences around St. Stephen's Green and Merrion Square are built of ugly brown bricks, but are spacious in their proportions, and were intended for large families of ample means, and the aristocracy have always occupied them. The Duke of Rutland has one of the largest, and in Merrion Street, just around the corner, at No. 24, in a large house now occupied by the land commission, the great Duke of Wellington was born. It was the town residence of the Earl of Mornington, his father, and her ladyship came in from Dangan Castle, twenty-four miles outside the city, and the country residence of the family, a few days before the event, which occurred on April 29, 1769. There is nothing either in the castle or in the town house to interest people to-day, except that they were the birthplace and the home of one of the greatest of Irishmen, and his fellow countrymen have raised a shaft, similar to that at Washington, in Phoenix Park in his honor.