Six weeks ago, when I was considering where I should go for my autumn holiday, some remarks of yours decided me “to give poor Paddy-land a turn” (the phrase is not mine, but that of the first housemaid I came across in Dublin). When one has been talking and thinking for the last eight years of little else than that “distressful country,” it certainly seemed a fair suggestion that one might as well go and look at it when one got the chance. So I have scrambled round from Dublin to Kerry, and from Cork to the Giant’s Causeway, and can bear hearty witness to the soundness of your advice. For a flying visit of a few weeks, though insufficient for any serious study of a people or country, may greatly help one in judging both of them from one’s ordinary standpoint at home. Of course, the first object of an Englishman who has not lost his head must be to ascertain whether the Irish people really long for a separate Parliament, and a severance of all connection with the rest of the Empire. Well, sir, I was prepared to find that the men in the street--car-drivers, boatmen, waiters, and fellow-travellers on the railways--would, to a great extent, adapt their opinions to whatever they might think would please their questioner, but certainly was quite unprepared for the absolute unanimity with which I was assured that Home Rule is dead. It is only the American-Irish, and especially the “Biddys of New York,” so my informants protested, “who want to break up the Union.” I was warned, however, as to the man in the street. “You must remember that our people are full of imagination, and you must take off a large discount from all they tell you; but you’ll always find a groundwork of fact at the bottom of their stories.” A good piece of advice, which a professional friend in Dublin started me with, and which I found to be true enough, except that where local politics or the land came in, the groundwork of fact was apt to be too minute to be easily discerned. Take, as an example, a story which was told me on the spot by a thoroughly trustworthy witness. Towards the end of Mr. Forster’s Chief-Secretaryship a sensation message was flashed to New York that a Government stronghold had been taken by the Invincibles, the garrison having surrendered with all the guns and stores. This announcement produced a liberal response in dollars from the other side, particularly from “the Biddys of New York.” Now for the “groundwork of fact” underlying this superstructure. The Government have, it seems, on their hands a number of Martello towers on the southern coast which are useless for military purposes. A band of some dozen “bhoys,” headed by a notorious Invincible, came out of Cork one summer evening and summoned the garrison of one of these Martello towers. The garrison (an elderly pensioner), who was at tea with his wife and children, wisely surrendered at discretion; whereupon the patriots took possession of