I'll take off or put on as the weather requires; and I think it very cruel if I must wear _mine_ simply because _you_ feel cold. I get warm--I almost grow angry--when I think of these things; and I wonder within myself why our people don't expose them as they might. Not that some are not doing the duty well and manfully, Tom. M'Hale is a glorious fellow; and for blackguarding a Prime Minister, for a real good effective slanging, it's hard to find his equal. He never embarrasses himself with logic,--he wastes no time in arguing, but "goes in" at once, and plants his blow between the eyes! That's what the English can't stand. They want discussion. They are always fishing for evidence for this, and a proof of that; but come down on them with a strong torrent of foul abuse, and you sweep them away like mud in a mill-race. That's where we always beat them in our controversial discussions, Tom; and we never failed so long as we relied on this superiority. It was like the bayonet in the hands of our infantry. Is n't it strange how I get back to Ireland in spite of me? I 'm like that madman in the story that can't keep Charles the First out of his memorial? And, after all, why should I? Is there anything more natural than to think of my country, if I can't manage to live in it? And this reminds me to ask you about home matters. What was it you wrote at the end of your letter about Jones McCarthy? I can't make out the word, whether it is his "death," or his "debts;" though, from my experience of the family, I surmise it to be the latter. If it's dead he is, I suppose we 'll come in for that blessed legacy that Mrs. D. has been talking about every day for the last twenty-five years, the history of which I have heard so often that I actually know nothing about it, except that it was the only bit of property possessed by my wife's relations they couldn't make away with. It was so strictly "tied up," as they call it in law, that nobody could ever get the use of it,--pretty much like the silver sixpence given to a schoolboy, with the express stipulation that he is never to change it.