" The kindly railway porter, also, who had
recommended Kavanagh's Hotel, was anxious to know how I found it, and so
busied himself to get me a good carriage when the train came in, that I
feel bound to exempt Athy from the judgment passed by Sir James
Allport's committee against the "amenities of railway travelling in
Ireland."

DUBLIN, _Saturday, March 10._--I called by appointment to-day upon Mr.
Brooke, the owner of the Coolgreany estate, at his counting-house in
Gardiner's Row. It is one of the spacious old last-century houses of
Dublin; the counting-room is installed with dark, old-fashioned mahogany
fittings, in what once was, and might easily again be made, a
drawing-room. Pictures hang on the walls, and the atmosphere of the
whole place is one of courtesy and culture rather than of mere modern
commerce. One of the portraits here is that of Mr. Brooke's
granduncle--a handsome, full-blooded, rather testy-looking old warrior,
in the close-fitting scarlet uniform of the Prince Regent's time.

"He ought to have been called Lord Baltimore," said Mr. Brooke
good-naturedly; "for he fought against your people for that city at
Bladensburg with Ross."

"That was the battle," I said, "in which, according to a popular
tradition in my country, the Americans took so little interest that they
left the field almost as soon as it began."

Another portrait is of a kinsman who was murdered in the highway here in
Ireland many years ago, under peculiarly atrocious circumstances, and
with no sort of provocation or excuse.

Mr. Brooke confirmed Dr. Dillon's statement that he had ordered out of
his counting-house two tenants who came into it with a peculiarly brazen
proposition, of which I must presume Dr. Dillon was ignorant when he
cited the fact as a count against the landlord of Coolgreany. I give the
story as Mr Brooke tells it. "The Rent Audit," he says, "at which my
tenants were idiots enough to join the Plan of Campaign occurred about
the 12th December 1886, when, as you know, I refused to accept the terms
which they proposed to me. I heard nothing more from them till about the
middle of February 1887, when coming to my office one day I found two
tenants waiting for me. One was Stephen Maher, a mountain man, and the
other Patrick Kehoe. 'What do you want?' I asked. Whereupon they both
arose, and Pat Kehoe pointed to Maher. Maher fumbled at his clothes, and
rubbed himself softly for a bit, and then produced a scrap of pape