in the Claddagh, a village of mud huts, which formed the
frontispiece by John Leech to "A Little Tour in Ireland" by "An
Oxonian," "a village of miserable cabins, the walls of mud and stone,
and for the most part windowless, the floors damp and dirty, and the
roofs a mass of rotten straw and weeds." Pigs and fowls mixed up with
boats and fish refuse. Women old, dried and ugly; girls young, dark, of
Spanish type, scantily dressed in bright-coloured short garments, all
tattered and torn; and children grotesque beyond description. I sketch
three members of one family clothed (!) in the three articles of attire
discarded by their father--one claimed the coat, another the trousers,
whilst the third had only a waistcoat. No doubt Leech had seen the same
sixteen years before, when he was there; and if "the Oxonian," who
survives him--Canon Hole, of Rochester--were to make another little tour
in Ireland, he would find the Claddagh still a spot to give an
Englishman "a new sensation." All I can say is, that having escaped a
"dhrouning" in the river when in Galway in 1873, I have visited many
countries and seen much filth and misery, but I have seen nothing
approaching the sad squalor of the wild West of Ireland.

The majority of those I sketched were hardly human. Tom Taylor was
right--"I would find such characters there not to be found in all the
world over," and I haven't. The people got on my overstrung youthful
nerves. I left the country the moment I had sufficient material for my
sketches. I had shaken off the unpleasant feeling of being murdered in
the river. I had survived living a week or two in the worst inns in the
world. I had risked typhoid and every other disease fostered by the
insanitary surroundings--for I had to hide myself in narrow turnings and
obnoxious corners so as to sketch unseen, as the religion of the natives
opposed any attempt to have themselves "dhrawn," believing that the
destruction of their "pictur'" would be fatal to their souls! I had
sketched the famous house in Deadman's Lane--and listened as I sketched
it, in the falling shades of night, to the old, old story of
Fitz-Stephen the Warden, who had lived there, and had in virtue of his
office to assist at the hanging of his own son. And, when in the dark I
was strolling back to my hotel, my reflections were suddenly interrupted
by something powerful seizing me in a grip of iron round my leg. I was
held as in a vice, and could hardly move, by what-