to make this point tell, four people must travel on the car.  In that case they must sit two on a side, each pair facing one side only of the landscape.  It is a very different business when you travel on an outside car alone, with the driver sitting on one side of it, or with one companion only, when the driver occupies the little perch in front between the sides of the car.  When you travel thus, the outside car is the best thing in the world, after a good roadster, for taking you rapidly over a country, and enabling you to command all points of the horizon.  Double up one leg on the seat, let the other dangle freely, using the step as a stirrup, and you go rattling along almost as if you were on horseback.

We drove through a long suburb of Strabane into the busiest quarter of the busy little place.  The names on the shops were predominantly Scotch—­Maxwells, Stewarts, Hamiltons, Elliotts.  I saw but one Celtic name, M’Ilhenny, and one German, Straub.  I changed gold for enormous Bank of Ireland notes at a neat local bank, and the cheery landlord of the Abercorn Arms gave us a fresh car to take us on to Letterkenny, a drive of some twenty miles.

The car came up like a small blizzard, flying about at the heels of an uncanny little grey mare.  Lord Ernest knew the beast well, and said she was twenty-five years old.  She behaved like an unbroken filly at first, but soon striking her pace, turned out a capital goer, and took us on without turning a hair till her work was done.  The weather continued to be good, but clouds rolled up around the horizon.

“It’ll always be bad weather,” said our saturnine jarvey, “when the Judges come to hold court, and never be good again till they rise.”

Here is a consequence of alien rule in Ireland, never, so far as I know, brought to the notice of Parliament.

“Why is this?” I asked; “is it because of the time of the year they select?”

“The time of year, sorr?” he replied, glancing compassionately at me.  “No, not at all; it’s because of the oaths!”

We reached Letterkenny in time for a very good luncheon at “Hegarty’s,” one of the neatest little inns I have ever found in a place of the size.  It stands on the long main street which is really the town.  At one end of this street is a very pretty row of picturesque ivy-clad brick cottages, built by a landlord whose property and handsome park bound the town on the west; and the street winds alongside the slope of a hill rising from the bank of the Swilly river.  A fair was going on.  The little market-place was alive with bustling, chattering, and chaffering country-folk.  Smartly-dressed young damsels tripped in and out of the neat well-filled shops, and in front of a row of semidetached villas, like a suburban London terrace, on the hill opposite “Hegarty’s,” a German band smote the air with discordant fury.  Decidedly a lively, prosperous little town is Letterkenny, nor was I surprised to learn from a communicative gentleman, nursing his cane near the inn-door, that advantage would be taken of the presence of the Hussars sent to keep order at Dunfanaghy, to “give a ball.”