f these lakes. When the Ulster settlement was made, these lands
with all the countryside were held by the O'Kanes. With the other Celtic
and Catholic inhabitants, they were driven by the masterful invaders
into the mountains and bogs. There still remain their descendants, still
Celtic and still Catholic, and still dreaming of the day when they shall
descend into the low country and drive the Protestant Scotch and English
from the "fat lands" which they occupy. In this way the racial and
religious animosities are kept alive, which have died out in Tipperary
and Waterford, for example, where the Cromwellian English have become
more Irish and often more Catholic than the Irish themselves.

I took a long drive and walk with Lord Ernest this afternoon through the
park, which rivals Curraghmore in extent. It is nowhere divided from the
lands of the adjoining tenants, and with great liberality is thrown open
to the people, not only of Newtown-Stewart and Strabane, but of all the
country. Parties, sometimes of seven hundred people, from Belfast come
down to pass the day in these sylvan solitudes, and it is to be recorded
to the praise of Ireland that these visitors always behave with perfect
good sense and good feeling.

The "terrible trippers" of the English midlands, as I once heard an old
verger in a northern Cathedral call them, who chip off relics from
monuments, pull up flowers by the roots, and scatter sandwich papers and
empty gingerbeer bottles broadcast over well-rolled lawns, are not
known, Lord Ernest tells me, in this island. As he neatly puts it, the
Irishman, no matter what his station in life may be, or how great a
blackguard he may really be, always instinctively knows when he ought to
behave like a gentleman, and knows how to do so. In the lakes were
hundreds of wild fowl. The sky was a sky of Constable--silvery-white
clouds, floating athwart a dome of clear Italian blue. The soil here
must be extraordinarily fertile. The woods and groves are dense beyond
belief. Cut down what you like, the growth soon overtakes you, as lush
almost as in the tropics.

There was a great cyclone here a year or two ago, which prostrated in a
night over a hundred thousand trees. You see the dentated gaps left by
this disaster in the great circle of firs and birches on the surrounding
hills, but they make hardly a serious break in the thoroughly sylvan
character of the landscape. We visited the centre of the devastation,
where I