In the suburbs of Galway are many acres of boggy land, which are cultivated as potato plots, highly enriched with salt sea-weed manure, and very productive. These farms--by which title they are dignified--were rented, we were told, at three to four pounds sterling per acre. Rents in the open country ranged from one pound upwards. Yet we bought cup potatoes at twopence per stone of sixteen lbs.; and for a leg of mutton paid sixpence English. Enquiring the cause of these singular anomalies, we were assured on all hands, that the system of renting through middlemen was the bane of Ireland. A farm might be sub-let two or three times, each tenant paying an increased rental, and the landlord-in-chief, a Blake, a Lynch, or a Martin, realizing less rent than he would obtain in Scotland or England. We heard of no Protestant oppressors here; the gentry and nobility worshipped at the same altar with the humblest of their dependents, and certainly meant them well and treated them considerately. We attended the English service in the ancient Gothic Abbey Church. The ministrations were of the strictest Puritan type; the sculptured escutcheons and tablets on the walls--the groined arches and bosses of the roof--were almost obliterated by thick coat upon coat of whitewash, laid on in an iconoclastic spirit which I have since seen equalled in the Dutch Cathedral of Rotterdam, and nowhere else. Another Sunday we visited a small Roman Catholic chapel at some distance. It was impossible to get inside the building, as the crowd of worshippers not only filled the sacred edifice, but spread themselves over a pretty extensive and well-filled churchyard, where they knelt throughout morning prayer, lasting a full hour or more. The party-feuds of the town are quite free from sectarian feeling. The fishermen, who were dressed from head to foot in hoddengray, and the butchers, who clothed themselves entirely in sky-blue--coats, waistcoats, breeches, and stockings alike, with black hats and shoes--constituted the belligerent powers. Every Saturday night, or oftener, they would marshal their forces respectively on the wide fish-market place, by the sea-shore, or on the long wharf extending into deep water, and with their shillelaghs hold high tournament for the honour of their craft and the love of fair maidens. One night, while the _Asia_ lay off the wharf, an unfortunate combatant fell senseless into the water and was drowned. But no inquiry followed, and no surprise was expressed at a circumstance so trivial. By the way, it would be unpardonable to quit Connemara without recording its "potheen." Every homestead had its peat-stack, and every peat-stack might be the hiding-place of a keg of illicit native spirits. We were invited, and encouraged by example, to taste a glass; but a single mouthful almost choked us; and never again did we dare to put the fiery liquid to our lips.