When I entered, mass was about to commence; five or six hundred persons were kneeling on benches or on the ground. I do not think that amongst the whole number there was a single one whose appearance did not indicate the deepest misery. By my side five or six men were telling their beads. They were almost colossi, with bull-dog heads, very short cropped hair and unshaven chins. They wore patched woollen shirts and looked like dock porters. A little further away there was a group of twelve or fifteen women, frightfully thin, with the hungry worn-out look one sees on so many faces over here. All these miserable creatures had evidently attempted to tidy themselves for Sunday. Most of them wore shoes. I am told that these shoes go to the pawnbroker regularly every Monday, and are redeemed on Saturday evening for Sunday’s mass. The dresses have lost all their colour and their lank folds show there is nothing worn underneath, but the poor owners all pray with marvellous fervour. I have never seen in any church the striking and sincere faith then visible amongst these unfortunate Irish whom Providence seems to have condemned to such a hard life. At the station I gained some information that made me a little anxious. It appears that on Sundays the trains run very irregularly. They could, therefore, only give me a ticket to Limerick Junction, about twenty or thirty miles from the city; but the officials told me that excursion trains often ran on Sundays from Cork to Limerick, perhaps I could catch one of them; so I entered the train on this rather doubtful chance. The appearance of the country through which we pass is very strange. I now understand the names “Green Erin” and the “Emerald Isle” which are so often found in Irish poetry. Green is the scarcely undulating plain which extends on each side of the railway; green also are the slightly elevated hills which bound the horizon. We may say that there is no agriculture. Only from time to time we catch sight of some fields of potatoes and oats. Not a single tree. The fences are only heaps of earth--the same enclosures that in Brittany are called _fossés_, only here there is seldom any hedge. My fellow-passengers explained to me that when a landowner wishes to make a plantation, everything is at once cut down by the tenants, or else they let their horses feed on the young trees, because they say no one has any right to deprive the people of the land by which they live.