left as quiet as before, the police marching leisurely back to their barracks.

We spent much of our time in rambling along the shore of Galway Bay, a beautiful and extensive harbour, where we found many curious specimens of sea-weeds, particularly the edible dilosk, and rare shells and minerals. Some of our people went out shooting snipe, and were warned on all hands to go in parties, and to take care of their guns, which would prove too strong a temptation for the native peasantry, as the spirit of Ribbonism was rife throughout Connemara. Another amusement was, to watch the groups of visitors from Tuam and the surrounding parts of Clare and other counties, who were attracted by the marvel of a ship of five hundred tons in their bay, no such phenomenon having happened within the memory of man. At another time we explored the rapid river Corrib, and the beautiful lake of the same name, a few miles distant. The salmon weirs on the river were exceedingly interesting, where we saw the largest fish confined in cribs for market, and apparently quite unconscious of their captivity. The castle of one of the Lynch family was visible from the bay, an ancient structure with its walls mounted with cannon to keep sheriffs' officers at a distance. Other feudal castles were also in sight.

Across the bay loomed the rugged mountains of Clare, seemingly utterly barren in their bleak nakedness. With the aid of the captain's telescope we could see on these inhospitable hills dark objects, which turned out to be the mud cabins of a numerous peasantry, the very class for whom, in this present year of 1883, Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues are trying to create an elysium of rural contentment. We traversed the country roads for miles, to observe the mode of farming there, and could find nothing, even up to the very streets of Galway, but mud cabins with one or two rooms, shared with the cow and pigs, and entrenched, as it were, behind a huge pile of manure that must have been the accumulation of years. Anything in the shape of valuable improvements was conspicuously absent.

Everything in Connemara seems paradoxical. These rough-coated, hard-worked, down-trodden Celts proved to be the liveliest, brightest, wittiest of mankind. They came in shoals to our ship, danced reels by the hour upon deck to a whistled accompaniment, with the most extravagant leaps and snapping of fingers. It was an amusing sight to see women driving huge pigs into the sea, held by a string tied to the hind leg, and there scraping and sluicing the unwieldy, squealing creatures until they came out as white as new cream. These Galway women are singularly handsome, with a decidedly Murillo cast of features, betokening plainly their Iberian ancestry. They might well have sat as models to the chief of Spanish painters.

In the suburbs of Galway are many acres of boggy land, which are cultivated as potato plots, highly enriched with salt sea-weed manure, and very productive. These farms—by which title they are dignified—were rented, we were told, at three to four pounds sterling per acre. Rents in the open country ranged from one pound upwards. Yet we bought cup potatoes at twopence per stone of sixteen lbs.; and for a leg of mutton paid sixpence English.

Enquiring the cause of these singular anomalies, we were assured on all hands, that the system of renting through middlemen was the bane of Ireland. A farm might be sub-let two or three times, each tenant paying an increased rental, and the landlord-in-chief, a Blake, a Lynch, or a Martin, realizing less rent than he would obtain in Scotland or England. We heard of no Protestant oppressors here; the gentry and nobility worshipped at the same altar with the humblest of their dependents, and certainly meant them well and treated them considerately.

We attended the English service in the ancient Gothic Abbey Church. The ministrations were of the strictest Puritan type; the sculptured escutcheons and tablets on the walls—the groined arches and bosses of the roof—were almost obliterated by thick coat upon coat of whitewash, laid on in an iconoclastic spirit which I have since seen equalled in the Dutch Cathedral of Rotterdam, and nowhere else. Another Sunday we visited a small Roman Catholic chapel at some distance. It was impossible to get inside the building, as the crowd of worshippers not only filled the sacred edifice, but spread themselves over a pretty extensive and well-filled churchyard, where they knelt throughout morning prayer, lasting a full hour or more.

The party-feuds of the town are quite free from sectarian feeling. The fishermen, who were dressed from head to foot in hoddengray, and the butchers, who clothed themselves entirely in sky-blue—coats, waistcoats, breeches, and stockings alike, with black hats and shoes—constituted the belligerent powers. Every Saturday night, or oftener, they would marshal their forces respectively on the wide fish-market place, by the sea-shore, or on the long wharf extending into deep water, and with their shillelaghs hold high tournament for the honour of their craft and the love of fair maidens. One night, while the Asia lay off the wharf, an unfortunate combatant fell senseless into the water and was drowned. But no inquiry followed, and no surprise was expressed at a circumstance so trivial.

By the way, it would be unpardonable to quit Connemara without recording its "potheen." Every homestead had its peat-stack, and every peat-stack might be the hiding-place of a keg of illicit native spirits. We were invited, and encouraged by example, to taste a glass; but a single mouthful almost choked us; and never again did we dare to put the fiery liquid to our lips.

Our recollections of Galway are of a mixed character—painful, because of the consciousness that the empire at large must be held responsible for the unequal distribution of nature's blessings amongst her people—pleasant, because of the uniform hospitality and courtesy shown to us by all classes and creeds of the townsfolk.

CHAPTER VI.

MORE SEA EXPERIENCES.

In the month of July we were ready for sea again. In the meantime Captain Ward had got together a new list of passengers, and we more than doubled our numbers by the addition of several Roman Catholic gentlemen of birth and education with their followers, and a party of Orangemen and their families, of a rather rough farming sort, escaping from religious feuds and hostile neighbours. A blooming widow Culleeney, of the former class, was added to the scanty female society on board; and for the first few hours after leaving port, we had fun and dancing on deck galore. But alas, sea-sickness put an end to our merriment all too soon. Our new recruits fled below, and scarcely showed their faces on deck for several days. Yet, in this apparently quiet interval, discord had found her way between decks.

We were listening one fine evening to the comical jokes and rich brogue of the most gentlemanly of the Irish Catholics above-mentioned, when suddenly a dozen men, women and children, armed with sticks and foaming at the mouth, rushed up the steerage hatchway, and without note of warning or apparent provocation, attacked the defenceless group standing near us with the blindness of insanity and the most frantic cries of rage. Fortunately there were several of the ship's officers and sailors on deck, who laid about them lustily with their fists, and speedily drove the attacking party below, where they were confined for some days, under a threat of severe punishment from the captain, who meant what he said. So this breeze passed over. What it was about, who was offended, and how, we never could discover; we set it down to the general principle, that the poor creatures were merely 'blue-mowlded for want of a bating.'

Moderately fair breezes, occasional dead calms, rude, baffling head-winds, attended us until we reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence. After sailing all day