Lord Ashbourne went off early to look up some fine old wooden mantelpieces and wainscotings in the “slums” of Dublin.  A brisk trade it seems has for some time been driven in such relics of the departed splendour of the Irish capital.  In the last century, when Dublin was further from London than London now is from New York, the Irish landlords were more fond of living in Dublin than a good many of the Irish Nationalists I know now are.  In this way the Iron Duke came to be born in Dublin, where his father and mother had a handsome town house, whereas when they went up to London they used to lodge, according to old Lady Cork, “over a pastry-cook’s in Oxford Street.”  In those days there must have been a good many fine solidly built and well decorated mansions in Dublin, of a type not unlike that of the ample rather stately and periwigged houses, all British brick without, and all Santo Domingo mahogany within, which, in my schoolboy days, used to give such a dignified old-world air to Third and Fourth Streets in Philadelphia.  It is among such of these as are still standing, and have come to vile uses, that the foragers from London now find their harvest.

From the Chief-Justice’s I went with Lord Ernest Hamilton to a meeting of the Irish Unionists.  Admission was by tickets, and the meeting evidently “meant business.”  I suppose Presbyterian Ulster was largely represented:  but Mr. Smith Barry of Fota Island, near Cork, one of the kindest and fairest, as well as one of the most determined and resolute, of the southern Irish landlords, was there, and the most interesting speech I heard was made by a Catholic lawyer of Dublin, Mr. Quill, Q.C., who grappled with the question of distress among the Irish tenants, and produced some startling evidence to show that this distress is by no means so great or so general as it is commonly assumed to be.[10] Able speeches were also made by Mr. T.W.  Russell, M.P. for Tyrone, and by Colonel Saunderson, the champion of Ulster at Westminster.  Both of these members, and especially Colonel Saunderson, “went for” their Nationalist colleagues with an unparliamentary plainness of speech which commanded the cordial sympathy of their audience.  “Is it possible,” asked Colonel Saunderson, “that you should ever consent, on any terms, to be governed by such—­, well, by such wretches as these?” to which the audience gave back an unanimous “Never,” neither thundered nor shouted, but growled, like Browning’s “growl at the gates of Ghent,”—­a low deep growl like the final notice served by a bull-dog, which I had not heard since the meetings which, at the North, followed the first serious fighting of the Civil War.  I was much struck, too, by the prevalence among the audience of what may be called the Old Middle State type of American face and head.  A majority of these men might have come straight from those slopes of the Alleghany which, from Pennsylvania down to the Carolinas, were planted so largely by the only considerable Irish emigrations known to our