After making the accompanying page of studies, I strolled along the bank of the river; and while sketching some men breaking stones an incident happened which first aroused me to the fact that the lot of the sketching artist is not always a happy one. A fiend in human shape--an overbearing overseer--came up at the moment, and roundly abused the poor labourers for taking the "base Saxon's" coin. Inciting them to believe that I was a special informer from London, he laughed on my declaring that I was merely a novice, and informed me that I ought to be "dhrounded." He was about to suit the action to the word and pitch me into the salmon-stuffed river when he was stopped by the mediation of my models, and I escaped from the grip of the agitator. In due course I found myself in the Claddagh, a village of mud huts, which formed the frontispiece by John Leech to "A Little Tour in Ireland" by "An Oxonian," "a village of miserable cabins, the walls of mud and stone, and for the most part windowless, the floors damp and dirty, and the roofs a mass of rotten straw and weeds." Pigs and fowls mixed up with boats and fish refuse. Women old, dried and ugly; girls young, dark, of Spanish type, scantily dressed in bright-coloured short garments, all tattered and torn; and children grotesque beyond description. I sketch three members of one family clothed (!) in the three articles of attire discarded by their father--one claimed the coat, another the trousers, whilst the third had only a waistcoat. No doubt Leech had seen the same sixteen years before, when he was there; and if "the Oxonian," who survives him--Canon Hole, of Rochester--were to make another little tour in Ireland, he would find the Claddagh still a spot to give an Englishman "a new sensation." All I can say is, that having escaped a "dhrouning" in the river when in Galway in 1873, I have visited many countries and seen much filth and misery, but I have seen nothing approaching the sad squalor of the wild West of Ireland.