An hour’s drive through a rolling country, showing white and weird under its blanket of snow in the night, brought us to this large, rambling, delightful house, the residence of Viscount de Vesci.  Mr. Gladstone came here from Lord Meath’s on his one visit to Ireland some years ago.  I find the house full of agreeable and interesting people; and the chill of the drive soon vanished under the genial influences of a light supper, and of pleasant chat in the smoking-room.  A good story was told there, by the way, of Archbishop Walsh, who being rather indiscreetly importuned to put his autograph on a fan of a certain Conservative lady well known in London, and not a little addicted to lion-hunting, peremptorily refused, saying, “no, nor any of the likes of her!” And another of Father Nolan, a well-known priest, who died at the age of ninety-seven.  When someone remonstrated with him on his association with an avowed unbeliever in Christianity, like Mr. Morley, Father Nolan replied, “Oh, faith will come with time!” The same excellent priest, when he came to call on Mr. Gladstone, here at Abbeyleix, on his arrival from the Earl of Meath’s, pathetically and patriarchally adjured him, on his next visit to Ireland, “not to go from one lord’s house to another, but to stay with the people.”  This was better than the Irish journal which, finding itself obliged to chronicle the fact that Mr. Gladstone, with his wife and daughter, was visiting Abbeyleix, gracefully observed that he “had been entrapped into going there!” Some one lamenting the lack of Irish humour and spirit in the present Nationalist movement, as compared with the earlier movements, Lord de Vesci cited as a solitary but refreshing instance of it, the incident which occurred the other day at an eviction in Kerry,[18] of a patriotic priest who chained himself to a door, and put it across the entrance of the cabin to keep out the bailiffs!

It is discouraging to know that this delightful act was bitterly denounced by some worthy and well-meaning Tory in Parliament as an “outrage”!

Despite the snow the air this morning, in this beautiful region, is soft and almost warm, and all the birds are singing again.  The park borders upon and opens into the pretty town of Abbeyleix, the broad and picturesque main thoroughfare of which, rather a rural road than a street, is adorned with a fountain and cross, erected in memory of the late Lord de Vesci.  There is a good Catholic chapel here (the ancient abbey which gave the place its name stood in the grounds of the present mansion), and a very handsome Protestant Church.

It is a curious fact that two of the men implicated in the Phoenix Park murders had been employed, one, I believe, as a mason, and one as a carver, in the construction of this church.  Both the chapel and the church to-day were well attended.  I am told there has been little real trouble here, nor has the Plan of Campaign been adopted here.  Sometimes Lord de Vesci finds threatening images of coffins and