The undrained fenceless farm, with its many-angled small fields and crooked ridges, exhausted to the last degree by successive corn crops, is still but too general; and the habitations, notwithstanding the marked improvement in their appearance in many places, in many others accord but too faithfully with the melancholy picture that has been drawn of them by so many observers--“walls decayed, roofs bent and sunken, thatch tattered, no windows, no chimneys; the turf-smoke rolling slowly from the doors, or seeking its way through the chinks and crevices innumerable with which these hovels abound. The appearance of the inmates corresponds with that of the miserable tenements--ill clad, squalid, haggard, listless and idle, in every countenance discontent strongly marked, and in some an expression akin to despair.” Such is the description given by Mr Weld in his Statistical Survey of Roscommon, taken in 1831. One epithet in that accurate description requires to be qualified to those who have not seen the interesting and highly valuable work from which it is taken. The poor of Elphin were “idle,” not of choice, but because the employment which offered itself in the wastes and sites for manufactories with which he describes the country to abound, were not rendered available; and throughout the country, wherever idleness and its concomitant misery are observable, there also it will be found that these evils are traceable to a want of sympathy and exertion on the part of the owners of the soil; for abundantly remunerating employment abounds in every part of the country. We cannot resist, even at the risk of extending this paper beyond the limits which we had at first proposed to ourselves, the temptation to bring forward an instance of that industry which we have never seen wanting when the inducement or even the possibility of exercising it with effect was present, afforded too by these same “idle” people of Elphin, as recorded in the same work. “Girls,” observes Mr Weld, “amongst whom some were really pretty and delicate, and of an age and frame of body seemingly but ill-suited to the task, sought a precarious and hard-earned livelihood in hawking turf about the town in cleaves, which they had carried on their backs from the bog, distant about two miles. The ordinary weight of one of these cleaves was three stones, or forty-two pounds, sometimes more. The price _asked_ for two cleaves was only 3½d, but as demands of this kind ordinarily exceed the selling price, 1½d might probably be set down as the utmost price of a single cleave; from this was to be deducted the price of the turf at the bog, the small surplus being all the gains for bearing this heavy burden, mostly up hill, and afterwards hawking it from house to house.” The cattle in the demesnes of the gentry and on dairy farms have in like manner been greatly improved within a few years, but amongst the small farmers the description of stock is in many places bad