One evening they saw the general departure of the mails for the provinces. They expected, as a matter of course, to find the guard of each coach armed, as in England, with a blunderbuss; but they found that he carried, in addition, a sword and pistols, while some of the coaches had two guards, and others even three. They left Dublin for Edgeworth-Town on a Sunday morning. For the first time in their life they heard bells rung from churches that did not belong to the Establishment. Rowland Hill’s Journal contains an interesting account of this tour:— “On the road to Edgeworth-Town we were struck with the miserable state of the poor Irish. Many live in huts without either window or chimney, the door serving every purpose of ingression and of egression. The poor women and children were generally without shoes and stockings; the men, however, almost always wear both, and even in the midst of summer appear dressed in great coats. Though Sunday, we saw many parties dancing in the roads and fields, the men in their great coats, and carts and wagons passed along apparently as much as on any other day. Every time the coach stopped it was surrounded by beggars, apparently in the lowest possible state of misery. “With a few exceptions, everything appears to be neglected. The land is miserably cultivated, and worse fenced, and the houses seem falling into ruin. You see gates with one hinge, and no fastening, tied up by means of ropes or haybands; windows reduced from a proper size to a single pane of glass, the remainder of the window, as it was broken, having been stopped up with a flat stone, a piece of wood, plaster, or a turf. In many places half the houses are in a state of ruin, and quite uninhabited. We learned that many had been reduced to this state at the time of the riots.” At Edgeworth-Town they lodged in the best inn of which the place could boast. Nevertheless under the bed they found put away a store of old shoes:— “After breakfast we went with Mr. Edgeworth to see his school. It consists of about 160 boys, of all classes, from the sons of beggars to the children of some of the most wealthy men in the neighbourhood. They are classed without any distinction but that of merit, and to destroy every difference in appearance, all the boys wore pinafores as a kind of uniform. Out of school, however, some distinction is made. The sons of gentlemen and respectable tradesmen have a separate playground, and the boarders are divided among two or three houses, according to their rank in society. “About three-fourths of the boys had neither shoes nor stockings, but they all appeared clean, happy, and contented.