ich from his point of view is quite proper and right,
he naturally influences his people in the direction which is most
likely to propagate the true faith, and give to it the predominance
which he believes to be its rightful due.

"The people round here are harmless, and will continue so, unless the
agitators get hold of them. They are ignorant, and easily led, and an
influential speaker who knew their simplicity could make them do
anything, no matter what. No, I couldn't say that they are
industrious. They do not work hard. They just go along, go along,
like. They have no enterprise at all, and you couldn't get them out of
the ways of their fathers. They'd think it a positive sin.

"Look at the present fine weather. This is a very early season. No
living man has seen such a spring-time in Ireland. Two months of fine
warm weather, the ground in fine working condition, everything six
weeks before last year. Not a man that started to dig a day earlier.
No, the old time will be adhered to just as if it was cold and wet and
freezing. You could not stir them with an electric battery. They moon,
moon, moon along, in the old, old, old way, waiting for somebody to
come and do something for them.

"If they had the land for nothing they would be no better off. They
would just do that much less work. They live from hand to mouth. They
have no ambition. The same thing that did for their fathers will do
for them, the same dirtiness, the same inconvenience. If their father
went three miles round a stone wall to get in at a gate they'll do it
too. Never would they think of making another gate. They turn round
angrily and say, 'Wasn't it good enough for my father, an' wasn't he a
betther man than ayther me or you?' If you lived here, you would at
first begin to show them things, but when you saw how much better
they like their own way you'd stop it. You'd very soon get your heart
broke. You couldn't stir them an inch in a thousand years. What will
Home Rule do for them? Nobody knows but Gladstone and the Divil."

A bystander said: "Down at Galway there was a man wid a donkey goin'
about sellin' fish, which was carried in two panniers. Whin he had
only enough to fill one pannier, he put a load o' stones into the
other pannier to balance the fish an' make the panniers stick on, an'
ride aisier.

"Well, one day an Englishman that had been watchin' Barney for some
time comes up to him an' he says, says he--

"'Whin ye have only fish