refusing to recognize a man who bought and sold his fellow-beings.  The Rev. John Scoble was one of the most conceited men I ever met.  His narrow ideas in regard to woman, and the superiority of the royal and noble classes in his own country, were to me so exasperating that I grew more and more bellicose every day we traveled in company.  He was terribly seasick crossing the Channel, to my intense satisfaction.  As he always boasted of his distinguished countrymen, I suggested, in the midst of one of his most agonizing spasms, that he ought to find consolation in the fact that Lord Nelson was always seasick on the slightest provocation.

The poverty in Ireland was a continual trial to our sensibilities; beggars haunted our footsteps everywhere, in the street and on the highways, crouching on the steps of the front door and on the curbstones, and surrounding our carriage wherever and whenever we stopped to shop or make a visit.  The bony hands and sunken eyes and sincere gratitude expressed for every penny proved their suffering real.  As my means were limited and I could not pass one by, I got a pound changed into pennies, and put them in a green bag, which I took in the carriage wherever I went.  It was but a drop in the ocean, but it was all I could do to relieve that unfathomed misery.  The poverty I saw everywhere in the Old World, and especially in Ireland, was a puzzling problem to my mind, but I rejected the idea that it was a necessary link in human experience—­that it always had been and always must be.

As we drove, day by day, in that magnificent Phoenix Park, of fifteen hundred acres, one of the largest parks, I believe, in the world, I would often put the question to myself, what right have the few to make a pleasure ground of these acres, while the many have nowhere to lay their heads, crouching under stiles and bridges, clothed in rags, and feeding on sea-weed with no hope, in the slowly passing years, of any change for the better?  The despair stamped on every brow told the sad story of their wrongs.  Those accustomed to such everyday experiences brush beggars aside as they would so many flies, but those to whom such sights are new cannot so easily quiet their own consciences.  Everyone in the full enjoyment of all the blessings of life, in his normal condition, feels some individual responsibility for the poverty of others.  When the sympathies are not blunted by any false philosophy, one feels reproached by one’s own abundance.  I once heard a young girl, about to take her summer outing, when asked by her grandmother if she had all the dresses she needed, reply, “Oh, yes!  I was oppressed with a constant sense of guilt, when packing, to see how much I had, while so many girls have nothing decent to wear.”