Mr Willis is a fortunate traveller. Often as we have stopped at the Donegal Arms, we never had the good fortune to see the pink heels or bare legs of a chambermaid; and the moral economy of the house must be greatly changed also, when they allow the gentlemen to be called by the said bare-legged damsels; a duty which, in our visits at it and all other respectable hotels, always devolved on that useful personage called Boots. We do not think, however, that this change of the system--leaving the calling of the gentlemen to the chambermaids--would work well, except in the case of American travellers. Still, however, as he says, he was in time, and started off--no longer in St Patrick's track, but on King William's route to the battle of the Boyne--and arrives in Drogheda to dinner. He tells us that the country is very bare of wood, and then proceeds in the following words to describe the habitations. "But what shall I say of the _human habitations_ in this (so called) most thriving and best-conditioned quarter of Ireland? If I had not seen every second face at a hovel-door with a smile on it, and heard laughing and begging in the same breath everywhere, I should think here were human beings abandoned by their Maker. Many of the dwellings I saw upon the roadside looked to me like the abodes of extinguished hope--forgotten instincts--grovelling, despairing, nay, almost idiotic wretchedness. I did not know there were such sights in the world. I did not know that men and women, upright, and made in God's image, could live in styes, like swine, _with_ swine--sitting, lying down, cooking and eating in such filth as all brute animals, save the one 'unclean,' revolt from and avoid. The extraordinary part of it, too, is, that it seems almost altogether the result of choice. I scarce saw one hovel, the mud-floor of which was not excavated several inches _below_ the ground-level without; and as there is no sill, or raised threshold, there is no bar, I will not say to the water, but to the liquid filth that oozes to its lower reservoir within. A few miles from Drogheda, I pointed out to my companions a woman sitting in a hovel at work, with the muddy water up to her ancles, and an enormous hog scratching himself against her knee. These disgusting animals were everywhere walking in and out of the hovels at pleasure, jostling aside the half-naked children, or wallowing in the wash, outside or in--the best-conditioned and most privileged inmates, indeed, of every habitation. All this, of course, is matter of choice, and so is the offal-heap, situated, in almost every instance, directly before the door, and draining its putrid mass into the hollow, under the peasant's table. Yet mirth _does_ live in these places--people _do_ smile on you from these squalid abodes of wretchedness--the rose of health _does_ show itself upon the cheeks of children, whose cradle is a dung-heap, and whose play-fellows are hogs! And of the beings who live