as health and comfort go, to the average home of the average “poor buccra,” between the Chesapeake and the Sabine.  I am afraid a great deal of not wholly innocuous nonsense has been written and spoken about this part of the United Kingdom by well-meaning philanthropists who have gauged the condition of the people here by their own standards of comfort and enjoyment.  Most things in this life of ours are relative.  I well remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compassion for a judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live “upon a pittance of eight thousand dollars a year.”

These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands of their own race in the slums of New York and Chicago and Liverpool and London.

Mrs. M’Donnell’s cousin, however, took dark views of things.  The times “were no good at all.”

The potatoes, I had heard, were doing well this year.

“No! they wouldn’t keep the people; indeed, they wouldn’t.  There would have to be relief.”

“Why not manure the land?”

“Manure? oh yes, the sea-stuff was good manure, but the people couldn’t get it.  They had no boats; and it cost eighteenpence a load to haul it from Bunbeg.  No! they couldn’t get it off the rocks.  At the Rosses they might; the Rosses were not so badly off as Derrybeg or Gweedore, for all they might say.”

“But Father M’Fadden had urged me,” I said, “to see the Rosses, because the people there were worse off than any of the people.”

“Well, Father M’Fadden was a good man; he was a friend of the people; and they were bad indeed at the Rosses, but they could get the sea-stuff there, and hadn’t to pay for cartage.  And indeed, if you put the sea-stuff on the bogland, the land was better in among the rocks’ at the Rosses than was the bogland, it was indeed:  the stuff did no good at all the first year.  The second and the third it gave good crops—­but then you must burn it—­and by the fourth year and the fifth it was all ashes, and no good at all!  This was God’s truth, it was; and there must be relief.”

“But could the people earn nothing in Scotland or in Tyrone?”

“Oh no, they could earn nothing at all.  They could pay no rent.”

So he sat there, a Jeremiah among the potsherds, quite contented and miserable—­well and hearty in a ragged frieze coat, with his hat over his eyes.

While we talked, a tall lusty young beggar-girl wandered in and out unnoticed.  Chickens pecked and fluttered about, and at intervals the inevitable small dog suddenly barked and yelped.

On our way back we met the elder daughter of Mrs. M’Donnell, a girl of sixteen, the “beauty of Gweedore.”  A beauty she certainly is, and of a type hardly to have been looked for here.