DEAR TOBY,--I write to you from here where I stay a day or two on my way to Dublin. I expect by the time it reaches you I will be installed in the Chief Secretary's Lodge, and the National League may prepare to sit up. I have been spending a week or two very agreeably in Scotland, a little out of the way of letters or newspapers. I am told there has been quite a demand for me, a sort of popular outcry that I should forthwith proceed to Ireland. This is, of course, not unflattering. It indicates a general belief which I, for one, am not disposed to contest, that if Ireland is to be saved, I'm the man to do it. That's all very well; but it is, doncha know, something of a boah to be thus bothered at a time when one had two or three pleasant engagements on hand. It used to be just the same in the House last Session. If I did not really live there, entering with the Mace and the SPEAKER, and leaving only at the cry of "Who goes home?" there were impetuous protests. I put in KING-HARMAN at Question time, but they wouldn't have him. Often, as I lay on the sofa in the Chief Secretary's room, looking over _Punch_, or reading the proofs of the forthcoming new edition of my _Defence of Philosophic Doubt_, I have heard the distant growls of the Irish Members when KING-HARMAN rose to answer a question addressed to me. Quite touching this personal attachment. At the same time a little embarrassing. Now I am really going to Dublin, and shall spend a cheerful November there. GRANDOLPH, in his genial way, has tried to make things pleasant by reminding me that from the drawing-room window of the Chief Secretary's Lodge I can see the place where poor FREDDY CAVENDISH fell. "They're sure to take a pot shot at you," he says; "but you're all right. Unless a man can make sure of hitting a lamp-post at fifty paces, it will be no use his trying to bring you down." A nice companionable man GRANDOLPH. Always tries to say something pleasant. But really I don't pay much attention to his kindly apprehensions. I shall be boahed, I daresay; but not by the passage of a bullet, or the thrust of a knife.