etext of enlightened curiosity touching certain
qualities of spun flax, to give us a glimpse of the "beauty of Sion"--a
well-grown graceful girl of fifteen or sixteen summers. She
concentrated her attention, as soon as we appeared, upon certain
mysterious bobbins and spindles, with an exaggerated determination which
proved how completely she saw through our futile and frivolous devices.
Mr. Herdman told us, as we came away discomfited, a droll story of the
ugliest girl ever employed here--a girl so preternaturally ugly that one
of his best blacksmiths having been entrapped into offering to marry
her, lost heart of grace on the eve of the sacrifice, and, taking ship
at Derry for America, fled from Sion for ever.

In the evening came, with other guests, Dr. Webb, Q.C., Regius Professor
of Laws and Public Orator of Trinity at Dublin, well known both as a
Grecian capable of composing "skits" as clever as the verses yclept
Homerstotle--in which the _Saturday Review_ served up the Donnelly
nonsense about Bacon and Shakespeare--and as a translator of _Faust_. He
was abused by the Loyalists at Dublin, in 1884, for his defence of P.N.
Fitzgerald, the leader who beat Parnell and Archbishop Croke so badly at
Thurles the other day; and he is in a fair way now to be denounced with
equal fervour by the Nationalists as a County Court judge in Donegal.
He finds this post no sinecure. "I do as much work in five days," he
said to-night, "as the Superior Judges do in five weeks."

He is a staunch Unionist, and laughs at the notion that the Irish people
care one straw for a Parliament in Dublin. "Why should they?" he said.
"What did any Parliament in Dublin ever do to gratify the one real
passion of the Irish peasant--his hunger for a bit of land? So far as
the Irish people are concerned, Home Rule means simply agrarian reform.
Would they get that from a Parliament in Dublin? If the British
Parliament evicts the landlords and makes the tenants lords of the land,
they will be face to face with Davitt's demand for the nationalising of
the land. Do you suppose they will like to see the lawyers and the
politicians organising a labour agitation against the 'strong farmers'?
The last thing they want is a Parliament in Dublin. Lord Ashbourne's Act
carries in its principle the death-warrant of the 'National League.'"

Some excellent stories were told in the picturesque smoking-room after
dinner, one of a clever and humorous, sensible and non-poli