guns scratched in the soil, with portraits indicating his agent or himself; but these mean little or nothing.  Lady de Vesci, who loves her Irish home, and has done and is doing a good deal for the people here, tells me, as an amusing illustration of the sort of terrorism formerly established by the local organisations, that when she met two of the labourers on the place together, they used to pretend to be very busy and not to see her.  But if she met one alone, he greeted her just as respectfully as ever.

The women here do a great deal of embroidery and lace work, in which she encourages them, but this industry has suffered what can only be a temporary check, from the change of fashion in regard to the wearing of laces.  Why the loveliest of all fabrics made for the adornment of women should ever go “out of fashion” would be amazing if anything in the vagaries of that occult and omnipotent influence could be.  The Irish ladies ought to circulate Madame de Piavigny’s exquisite Lime d’Heures, with its incomparable illustrations by Carot and Meaulle, drawn from the lace work of all ages and countries, as a tonic against despair in respect to this industry.  In one of the large rooms of her own house, Lady de Vesci has established and superintends a school of carving for the children of poor tenants.  It has proved a school of civilisation also.  The lads show a remarkable aptitude for the arts of design, and of their own accord make themselves neat and trim as soon as they begin to understand what it is they are doing.  They are always busy at home with their drawings and their blocks, and some of them are already beginning to earn money by their work.

What I have seen at Adare Manor near Limerick, where the late Earl of Dunraven educated all the workmen employed on that mansion as stone-cutters and carvers, suffices to show that the people of this country have not lost the aptitudes of which we see so many proofs in the relics of early Irish art.

Among the guests in the house is a distinguished officer, Colonel Talbot, who saw hard service in Egypt, and in the advance on Khartoum, with camels across the desert—­a marvellous piece of military work.  I find that he was in America in 1864-65, with Meade and Hunt and Grant before Petersburg, being in fact the only foreign officer then present.  He there formed what seem to me very sound and just views as to the ability of the Federal commanders in that closing campaign of the Civil War, and spoke of Hunt particularly with much admiration.  Of General Grant he told me a story so illustrative of the simplicity and modesty which were a keynote in his character that I must note it.  The day before the evacuation of Petersburg by the Con federates, Grant was urged to order an attack upon the Confederate positions.  He refused to do so.  The next day the Confederates were seen hastily abandoning them.  Grant watched them quietly for a while, and then putting down his glass, said to one of the officers who had urged the assault, “You were right, and I was wrong.  I ought to have attacked them.”