plauded Disestablishment and Denominational
Schools he meant Land, Land, nothing but Land. At last his dominant
feeling is candidly expressed when he cries out against landlords,
"Down wid 'em!"

In one of those neat remarks, distracting attention from the real
point at issue, for which Lord Beaconsfield is justly famous, he
expressed an opinion that "the Irish people are discontented because
they have no amusements." Like all such sayings, it is true as far as
it goes. Despite dramatists, novelists and humorists, Ireland is
singularly barren of diversion. In a former letter I pointed out that
the only relaxation from dreary toil enjoyed in Mayo is found at the
cattle-fairs, and little country races to which they give rise. There
are no amusements at all at Connemara. One ballad-singer and one
broken-legged piper are the only ministers to public hilarity that I
have yet seen. Nothing more dreary can be imagined than the existence
of the inhabitants. When by rare good luck a peasant secures road-work
or other employment from a proprietor at once sufficiently solvent and
public-spirited to undertake any enterprise for the improvement of the
country, he will walk for a couple or three hours to his work and then
go on with it till dinner-time. But it is painfully significant that
the word "dinner" is never used in this connection. The foreman does
not say that the dinner hour has arrived, but "Now, boys, it is time
to eat your bit o' bread." The expression is painfully exact; for the
repast consists of a bit of bread and perhaps a bottle of milk. Indian
corn meal is the material of the bit of bread, a heavy square block
unskilfully made, and so unattractive in appearance that no human
being who could get anything else would touch it. Then the man works
on till it is time to trudge over the mountain to the miserable cabin
he imagines to be a home, and meet his poor wife, weary with carrying
turf from a distant bog, and his half-clad and more than half-starved
children. Luckily the year has been a good one for drying peat, and
one necessity for supporting human life is supplied. What the
condition of the people must be when fuel is scarce is too terrible to
think of.

I esteem myself fortunate in being enabled to describe what the life
of the Connemara peasant is under favourable circumstances. His abject
misery in years of famine and persistent rain, when crops fail and
peat cannot be dried, may be left to the imagination.