Another thing, perhaps he was not so strongly framed as the victim of the fair Delilah; and also, perhaps the Irish were better builders than the Jews: the examination of the ruins strongly inclines me to this latter hypothesis. They consist of two or three rather dismantled towers, for the old fortress, which had remained intact until 1688, was taken at this date from the partisans of King James who defended it, by the Hanoverians, who undermined it and blew it up. My Automedon did all in his power to awaken my sympathy for the family misfortunes; I also think he claimed some relationship to them, but I am not quite sure, for Irish explanations are rather diffuse and hard to comprehend. In courses of elementary mathematics pupils are often given very complicated formulæ to extract the unknown quantity therefrom: the conversations of the Irish remind me of these studies of my youth. They are so embarrassed with incidental phrases, pious exclamations, or simply polite expressions, such as “Please your honour,” that the unknown, that is to say, the true meaning, is hard to extricate. Furthermore, they have a mania for answering one question by another. For instance, when I asked my coachman if he knew his way, instead of simply answering “Yes,” he asked me if I thought he did not know his own mother. Besides, the length of his discourse and his anxiety to impart to me all the historical reminiscences which I have faithfully recorded, had manifestly the object of deluding me about the distance which separates Castle Connell from Ballinacourty. In reality it is only a mile, and, in spite of his efforts, in less than half an hour we arrived in front of Colonel M----’s house. My host is still a victim of the Land League. This is his history. It is curious, precisely because it resembles that of hundreds of other landlords. All the tenants on his estate, in County Clare, had leases of thirty-one years, which fact, in parenthesis, is a formal contradiction to Mr. Parnell, when he claims _fixity of tenure_, that is to say, security for the tenants, and declares that one of the chief reasons which prevent improvements is that the landlords refuse to give them leases, and like to retain the right of sending them away whenever they please. I may even add that I have seen a number of these leases, and my tenants may feel certain that I will never sign anything like them. It seems to me that the essential point of a lease is that it should be bilateral--that the two parties should be bound for the same time. Each runs some risk. If the years are good the landlord does not benefit by the rise, but if they are bad he does not suffer from the fall.