threadbare swallow-tails and a sort of perennial yesterday’s shirt-front. And what is true of the hotels is true of the houses. There is a district between Sackville Street and the ⸺ Railway Station which contains a very large number of the somberest, most forbidding, and dirtiest-looking domiciles it has ever been my lot to come across. Formerly these houses were the homes of the easy and the well-to-do; now they are let off in tenements to the poorest of the poor. Black and grinding poverty peeps out of the cracked and paper-patched windows of them; groups of grubby, bare-legged, blue-cold children huddle round their decrepit doors, or scamper up and down the filthy pavements in front of them. The places may be sanitary enough within the meaning of the Acts, but that they are filthy and foul, to a nauseating degree, no person can doubt. Such rookeries would be clean swept away by the authorities in any English city. In Dublin nobody seems to trouble about them, or to be in the smallest sense disturbed by them. They are a part and parcel of dear, dirty Dublin, and haply Dublin would not be Dublin without them. In the other Irish cities and towns the same tendency to squalor and grime and filth is painfully noticeable. Even in a center like Portadown, which, be it noted, is Protestant and to a great extent new, the same undesirable traits assail you pretty well wherever you go. In a city set on a hill, without a factory to its name, I found a blackness and a grime which reminded me of nothing so much as Gravesend or Stockport. The hotel in that same city was as crazy as it was chilly and comfortless—poky rooms and dark little passages, meager and dubious furnishings, and dirt, dirt, dirt, from basement to attic. Yet the place seemed populous with cleaner wenches, floor-scrubbers, and clout-women. There was a boy in a green apron, who appeared to do nothing all day but dust the banisters, and the waiters were eternally flicking the dust off things with their napkins. And such waiters: wall-eyed, heated, fumbling, grumpy, and incompetent. They insisted on getting in one another’s way, and they had a gift of dilatoriness that amounted to genius. In this place, let me set down a small fact about the Irish waiter which may, perhaps, save future travelers in Ireland some trouble. If you ask an English waiter for a time-table he will bring it to you, and leave you to your own devices. If you ask an Irish waiter, he will say “Time-table, yes, sir. Where will you be afther goin’, sir?” You are taken unawares, and quite foolishly tell him the name of the next town on your itinerary. Forthwith he informs you that there is a very good hotel there “be the name of the Jukes Head,” and that the next train “convanient” goes at “wan-thirty.” Is it a quick train? “Oh, yes.” Will he see that your baggage Is taken to the station in time to catch it? Certainly he will. You keep your mind easy and turn up at the station at “wan-thirty.” There