EDENVALE, Sunday, Feb. 19.—­I was awakened at dawn by the clamour of countless wild ducks, to a day of sunshine as brilliant and almost as warm as one sees at this season in the south of France.  Mrs. Stacpoole speaks of this place with a kind of passion, and I can quite understand it.  Clearly this, again, is not a case of the absentee landlord draining the lifeblood of the land to lavish it upon an alien soil!  The demesne is a sylvan sanctuary for the wild creatures of the air and the wood, and they congregate here almost as they did at Walton Hall in the days of that most delightful of naturalists and travellers, whose adventurous gallop on the back of a cayman was the delight of all English-reading children forty years ago, or as they do now at Gosford.  Yet the crack of the gun, forbidden in the precincts of Walton Hall, is here by no means unknown—­the whole family being noted as dead shots.  I asked Mr. Stacpoole this morning whether the park had been invaded by trespassers since the local Nationalists declared war upon him.  He said that his only experience of anything like an attack befell not very long ago, when his people came to the house on a Sunday afternoon and told him that a crowd of men from Ennis, with dogs, were coming towards the park with a loudly proclaimed intent to enter it, and go hunting upon the property.

Upon this Mr. Stacpoole left the house with his brother and another person, and walked down to the park entrance.  Presently the men of Ennis made their appearance on the highway.  A very brief parley followed.  The men of Ennis announced their intention of marching across the park, and occupying it.

“I think not,” the proprietor responded quietly.  “I think you will go back the way you came.  For you may be sure of one thing:  the first man who crosses that park wall, or enters that gate, is a dead man.”

There was no show of weapons, but the revolvers were there, and this the men of Ennis knew.  They also knew that it rested with themselves to create the right and the occasion to use the revolvers, and that if the revolvers were used they would be used to some purpose.  To their credit, be it said, as men of sense, they suddenly experienced an almost Caledonian respect for the “Sabbath-day,” and after expressing their discontent with Mr. Stacpoole’s inhospitable reception, turned about and went back whence they had come.

This morning an orderly from Ennis brought out news of the arrest yesterday, at the Clare Road, of Mr. Lloyd, a Labour delegate from London, on his return from an agitation meeting at Kildysart.  Harding, the Englishman I saw awaiting his trial yesterday, became bail for Lloyd.