of the theory that it is the thumb which differentiates man from the
lower animals. Twenty times this evening I have been reminded of the
retort I heard made the other day at Cork by a lawyer, who knows Mr.
Kavanagh well, to a priest of "Nationalist" proclivities, who knows him
not at all. Some allusion having been made to Borris, the lawyer said to
me, "You will see at Borris the best and ablest Irishman alive." On this
the priest testily and tartly broke in, "Do you mean the man without
hands or feet?"

"I mean," replied the lawyer, very quietly, "the man in whom all that
has gone in you or me to arms and legs has gone to heart and head!"

Borris House stands high in the heart of an extensive and nobly wooded
park, and commands one of the finest landscapes I have seen in Ireland.
As we stood and gazed upon it from the hall door, the distant hills were
touched with a soft purple light such as transfigures the Apennines at
sunset.

"You should see this view in June," said Mrs, Kavanagh, "we are all
brown and bare now."

Brown and bare, like most other terms, are relative. To the eye of an
American this whole region now seems a sea of verdure, less clear and
fresh, I can easily suppose, than it may be in the early summer, but
verdure still. And one must get into the Adirondacks, or up among the
mountains of Western Virginia, to find on our Atlantic slope such trees
as I have this evening seen. One grand ilex near the house could hardly
be matched in the Villa d'Este.

The house is stately and commodious, and more ancient than it appears to
be,--so many additions have been made to it at different times. It has
passed through more than one siege, and in the '98 Mr. Kavanagh tells me
the townspeople of Borris came up here and sought refuge. There are vast
caverns under the house and grounds, doubtless made by taking out from
the hill the stone used in building this house, and the fortresses which
stood here before it. In these all sorts of stores were kept, and many
of the people found shelter.

I need not say that there is a banshee at Borris--though no living
witness, I believe, has heard its warning wail. But as we sat in the
beautiful library, and watched the dying light of day, a lady present
told us a tale more gruesome than many of those in which the "psychical"
inquirers delight. She was sitting, she said, in an upper room of an
ancient mansion here in Carlow, in which she lives, when, from the lawn
below,