n the eloquence. Dissent or contradiction was a thing
unheard of; they were all subjects upon which each felt precisely alike.

No man's experience pointed to anything save rainy seasons and wet
potatoes, cheap bacon and high county cess. Life had its one phase
of monotonous want, only broken in upon by the momentary orgie of an
election, or the excitement of a county town on the Saturday of an
execution.

And so it was. Like the nor'-easter that followed them over the seas,
came all the memories of what they had left behind. They had little care
for even a passing look at the new and strange objects around them. The
giant cedar-trees along the banks,--the immense rafts, like floating
islands, hurrying past on the foaming current, with myriads of
figures moving on them,--the endless forests of dark pines, the quaint
log-houses, unlike those farther north, and with more pretension to
architectural design,--and now and then a Canadian "bateau" shooting
past like a sword-fish, its red-capped crew saluting the steamer with a
wild cheer that would wake the echoes many a mile away: if they looked
at these, it was easy to see that they noted them but indifferently;
their hearts were far away. Ay, in spite of misery, and hardship, and
famine, and flood, they were away in the wilds of Erris, in the bleak
plains of Donegal, or the lonely glens of Connemara.

It has often struck me that our rulers should have perpetuated the names
of Irish localities in the New World. One must have experienced the
feeling himself to know the charm of this simple association. The hourly
recurring name that speaks so familiarly of home, is a powerful antidote
to the sense of banishment. Well, here I am, prosing about emigrants,
and their regrets, and wants, and hopes, and wishes, and forgetting the
while the worthy little group who, with a hot "net" of potatoes (for in
this fashion each mess is allowed to boil its quota), and a very savory
cut of ham, awaited my presence in the steerage; they were good and
kindly souls every one of them. The old grandfather was a fine prosy old
grumbler about the year '98 and the terrible doings of the "Orangemen."
Joe was a stout-hearted, frank fellow that only wanted fair play in
the world to make his path steadily onward. The sons were, in Irish
parlance, "good boys," and the girls fine-tempered and good-natured,--as
ninety-nine out of the hundred are in the land they come from.

Now, shall I forfeit some of m