As we drive along the road, we see, if the umbrellas can be closed for a half-hour, flocks of sheep grazing on the tops of the hills, where it is sunnier, where food is better and flies less numerous. Crystal streams and waterfalls are pouring down the hillsides to lose themselves in one of Connemara's many bays, and we have a glimpse of osmunda fern, golden green and beautiful. It was under a branch of this Osmunda regalis that the Irish princess lay hidden, they say, till she had evaded her pursuers. The blue turf smoke rises here and there,--now from a cabin with house-leek growing on the crumbling thatch, now from one whose roof is held on by ropes and stones,--and there is always a turf bog, stacks and stacks of the cut blocks, a woman in a gown of dark-red flannel resting for a moment, with the empty creel beside her, and a man cutting in the distance. After climbing the long hill beyond the 'station' we are rewarded by a glimpse of more fertile fields; the clumps of ragwort and purple loosestrife are reinforced with kingcups and lilies growing near the wayside, and the rare sight, first of a pot of geraniums in the window, and then of a garden all aglow with red fuchsias, torch plants, and huge dahlias, so cheers Veritas that he takes heart again. “This is something like home!” he exclaims breezily; whereupon Mr. Shamrock murmurs that if people find nothing to admire in a foreign country save what resembles their own, he wonders that they take the trouble to be travelling. “It is a darlin' year for the pitaties,” the drivers says; and there are plenty of them planted hereabouts, even in stony spots not worth a keenogue for anything else, for “pitaties doesn't require anny inTHRICKet farmin', you see, ma'am.” The clergyman remarks that only three things are required to make Ireland the most attractive country in the world: “Protestantism, cleanliness, and gardens”; and Mr. Shamrock, who is of course a Roman Catholic, answers this tactful speech in a way that surprises the speaker and keeps him silent for hours. The Birmingham cutler, who has a copy of Ismay's Children in his pocket, triumphantly reads aloud, at this moment, a remark put into the mouth of an Irish character: “The low Irish are quite destitute of all notion of beauty,--have not the remotest particle of artistic sentiment or taste; their cabins are exactly as they were six hundred years ago, for they never want to improve themselves.” Then Mr. Shamrock asserts that any show of prosperity on a tenant's part would only mean an advance of rent on the landlord's; and Mr. Rose retorts that while that might have been true in former times, it is utterly false to-day.