his matter the Tipperary
men are sentimental enough--conservative enough for anything. At
Tipperary, of all places, the brutal Saxon will learn how much has
been bequeathed to Irishmen by their mighty forefathers.

The eastern side is better. A grand new Roman Catholic church has just
been built at a cost of L25,000, and in front of the gilded
railings--for they are gilt like the railings of Paris--were dreadful
old women, like Macbethian witches, holding out their skinny hands for
alms. Smartly dressed young ladies, daughters of publicans and
shopkeepers, passed in jauntily, took a splash in the holy water,
crossed themselves all over, knocked off a few prayers, and tripped
merrily away. The better parts of the town belong to Mr. Smith-Barry,
the knock-me-down cabins to Mr. Stafford O'Brien, whose system is
different. As the leases fall in the former has modern houses built,
while the latter is in the hands of the middlemen, who sub-let the
houses, and leave things to slide. The _laissez-aller_ policy is very
suitable to the genius of the genuine Irish, who may be said to rule
the roost in Tipperary.

I interviewed all sorts and conditions of men, but every individual
bound me down to closest secrecy. And although nobody said anything
approaching high treason, their alarm on finding they had ventured to
express to a stranger anything like their real opinion was very
significant. The conversations took place last evening, and this
morning before breakfast a young man called on me at the Station
Hotel, Limerick Junction, three miles from Tipperary, "on urgent
business." "Me father thinks he said too much, an' that ye moight put
what he said in print, wid his name to it. Ye promised ye wouldn't,
an' me father has confidence, but he wishes to remoind ye that there's
plinty in Tipperary would curse him for spakin' wid an Englishman, an'
that dozens of thim would murther him or you for the price of a pot of
porter." Another messenger shortly arrived, bearing a letter in which
the writer said that any mention of his name would simply ruin him,
and that he might leave the country at once. And yet these men had
only said what Englishmen would account as nothing.

New Tipperary adjoins the old, to which it is on the whole superior.
All the descriptions I have seen of the Land League buildings are
untrue and unfair. Most of them were written by men who never saw the
place, and who paraphrased and perpetuated the original error