e obviously intended to be read, not in Ireland,
where nobody seems to take the least interest in Irish affairs beyond
his own bailiwick, but in England and America, it is only natural, I
suppose, that they should be coloured to suit the taste of the market
for which they are destined. It is astonishing how little interest the
people generally show in the newspapers. The Irish make good journalists
as they make good soldiers; but most of the journalists who now
represent Irish constituencies at Westminster find their chief field of
activity, I am told, not in Irish but in British or in American
journals. Mr. Roche, R.M., who travelled with us as far as Castle
Island, where we left him, was much less moved by the grotesque accounts
given in the local journals of his conduct yesterday than by Mr.
Gladstone's "retractation" of the extraordinary attack which he made the
other day upon Mr. Roche himself, and four other magistrates by name.

"The retractation aggravates the attack," he said.

When one sees what a magistrate now represents in Ireland, it certainly
is not easy to reconcile an inconsiderate attack upon the character and
conduct of such an officer with the most elementary ideas of good
citizenship.

After Mr. Roche left us, a gentleman in the carriage, who is interested
in some Castle Island property, told us that nothing could be worse than
the state of that region. Open defiance of the moral authority of the
clergy is as rife there, he says, as open defiance of the civil
authorities. The church was not long ago broken into, and the sacred
vestments were defiled; and, but the other day, a young girl of the
place came to a magistrate and asked him to give her a summons against
the parish priest "for assaulting her." The magistrate, a Protestant,
but a personal friend of the priest, esteeming him for his fidelity to
his duties, asked the girl what on earth she meant. She proceeded with
perfect coolness to say that the priest had impertinently interfered
with her, "assaulted her," and told her to "go home," when he found her
sitting in a lonely part of the road with her young man, rather late at
night! For this, the girl, professing to be a Catholic, actually wanted
the Protestant magistrate to have her parish priest brought into his
court! He told the girl plainly what he thought of her conduct,
whereupon she went away, very angry, and vowing vengeance both against
the priest and against him.

This same gentle