he beast well, and said she
was twenty-five years old. She behaved like an unbroken filly at first,
but soon striking her pace, turned out a capital goer, and took us on
without turning a hair till her work was done. The weather continued to
be good, but clouds rolled up around the horizon.

"It'll always be bad weather," said our saturnine jarvey, "when the
Judges come to hold court, and never be good again till they rise."

Here is a consequence of alien rule in Ireland, never, so far as I know,
brought to the notice of Parliament.

"Why is this?" I asked; "is it because of the time of the year they
select?"

"The time of year, sorr?" he replied, glancing compassionately at me.
"No, not at all; it's because of the oaths!"

We reached Letterkenny in time for a very good luncheon at "Hegarty's,"
one of the neatest little inns I have ever found in a place of the size.
It stands on the long main street which is really the town. At one end
of this street is a very pretty row of picturesque ivy-clad brick
cottages, built by a landlord whose property and handsome park bound
the town on the west; and the street winds alongside the slope of a hill
rising from the bank of the Swilly river. A fair was going on. The
little market-place was alive with bustling, chattering, and chaffering
country-folk. Smartly-dressed young damsels tripped in and out of the
neat well-filled shops, and in front of a row of semidetached villas,
like a suburban London terrace, on the hill opposite "Hegarty's," a
German band smote the air with discordant fury. Decidedly a lively,
prosperous little town is Letterkenny, nor was I surprised to learn from
a communicative gentleman, nursing his cane near the inn-door, that
advantage would be taken of the presence of the Hussars sent to keep
order at Dunfanaghy, to "give a ball."

"But I thought all the country was in arms about the trials at
Dunfanaghy," I said.

"In arms about the trials at Dunfanaghy? Oh no; they'll never be locked
up, Father M'Fadden and Mr. Blane. And the people here at Letterkenny,
they've more sinse than at Dunfanaghy. Have you heard of the champagne?"

Upon this he proceeded to tell me, as a grand joke, that Father
M'Fadden and Mr. Blane, M.P., having declined to accept the tea offered
them by the authorities during their detention, they had been permitted
to order what they liked from the local hotel-keeper. After the trial
was over, and they were released on bail to prosec