r
some mysterious reason Lord Spencer put these officers into chocolate
coats with white facings. But the new order soon gave place to the old
again.

At the dinner to-night was Lord Ormonde, who is returning to London, but
kindly promised to make arrangements for showing me at Kilkenny Castle
the muniment room of the Butlers, which contains one of the most
valuable private collections of charters and State papers in the realm.

_Tuesday, Jan. 31._--I lunched to-day with Sir Michael Morris, the Lord
Chief Justice of Ireland, whom I had last seen in Rome at the Jubilee
Mass of His Holiness. Sir Michael is one of the recognised lights of
social life and of the law in Dublin. While he was in Rome some one
highly commended him in the presence of that staunch Nationalist the
Archbishop of Dublin, who assented so far as to say, "Yes, yes, there
are worse fellows in Dublin than that Morris!" It would be hard to find
a more typical Irishman of the better sort than Sir Michael, a man more
sure, in the words of Sheridan, to "carry his honour and his brogue
unstained to the grave."

The brogue of Sir Michael, it is said, made his fortune in the House of
Commons. It has hardly the glow which made the brogue of Father Burke a
memory as of music in the ears of all who heard it, and differs from
that miraculous gift of the tongue as a ripe wine of Bordeaux differs
from a ripe wine of Burgundy. But to the ordinary brogue of the street
and the stage, it is as is a Brane Mouton Rothschild of 1868 to the
casual Medoc of a Parisian restaurant. "Do you know Father Healy?" said
one of the company to whom I spoke of it; "he was at a wedding with Sir
Michael. As the happy pair drove off under the usual shower of rice and
old slippers, Sir Michael said to the Father, 'How I wish I had
something to throw after her!' 'Ah, throw your brogue after her,'
replied the Father."

This brogue comes to Sir Michael lawfully enough. He belongs to one of
the fourteen tribes of Galway. His father, Mr. Martin Morris, was High
Sheriff of the County of Galway City in 1841, being the first Catholic
who had served that office since the time of Tyrconnel. His mother was a
Blake of Galway, and the family seat, Spiddal, came to them through a
Fitzpatrick. "Remember these things," said one of the guests to me, a
Catholic from the south of Ireland, "and remember that Sir Michael, like
myself, and, so far as I know, like every Irish Catholic in this room
to-day,