rs, the harvest money from England and the
labourers' wages brought from Scotland which have kept body and soul
together after a poor fashion. The annual migration of reapers and
labourers has been a matter not of enterprise, but of necessity; for
on the summer savings, varying from 10l. to 15l., the family entirely
depend. It is, therefore, an absolute mistake to speak of the Mayo and
Galway men as peasant cultivators living on the produce of the soil
they cultivate. It cannot be done. I have talked to scores of these
people, and have invariably found that a decent cabin with properly
clad inhabitants depended upon something beyond the food produced on
the spot. Either the father went to England for the harvest, or the
boys were working in a shipyard on the Clyde, or the girls were in
America and sent home money. On the seashore, among the wretched
people who send their children out on the coast to pick shell-fish
worth fourpence per stone, I found here and there a household such as
I have described really depending on money earned far away. I have
thought it well to put the case somewhat strongly because it is sheer
absurdity to expect that a living for a family can be extracted from
five Irish acres of land in Connaught. In very good years, and when
credit is abundant, not so unusual an occurrence as might be supposed,
it is just possible for the peasant to struggle on; but he can never
be said to live. His land is exhausted by the old Mayo rotation of
"potatoes, oats, burn," and he has no manure but guano and seaweed.

It is like inhaling fresh air to turn aside from poorly nourished
people and land to look, from the window of Casson's hotel at
Letterfrack, on two bright green oases rising amid a brown desert of
bog. Turnips and mangolds are growing in great forty-acre squares.
Dark-ribbed fields of similar size show where the potatoes have been
dug, and men are dotted here and there busily engaged with work of
various kinds. The green oases at the mouth of the magnificent pass of
Kylemore are the work of Mr. Mitchell-Henry, M.P. for the county of
Galway. When Mr. Henry first went salmon-fishing in the river Dowris,
which flows from Kylemore Lake into the sea at Ballynakill Harbour,
Kylemore was a mountain pass and nothing more. Now it not only boasts
a castle, but is the centre of extraordinary activity, the first
fruits of which are seen in the villages of Currywongoan and
Greenmount already alluded to as forming