He told me some very entertaining tales of the methods used by certain well-meaning occupants of the Castle in former days to capture Irish popularity, as, for example, one of a Vice-Queen who gave a fancy dress ball for the children of the local Dublin people of importance, and had a beautiful supper of tea and comfits, and cakes served to them, after which she made her appearance, followed by servants bearing huge bowls of steaming hot Irish potatoes, which she pressed upon the horrified and overstuffed infants as “the true food of the country,” setting them herself the example of eating one with much apparent gusto, and a pinch of salt!

“Now, fancy that!” he exclaimed; “for the Dublin aristocracy who think the praties only fit for the peasants!”

Of a well-known and popular personage in politics, he told me that he once went with him on a canvassing tour.  It was in a county the candidate had never before visited.  “When we came to a place, and the people were all out crying and cheering, he would whisper to me, ’Now what is the name of this confounded hole?’ And I would whisper back, ‘Ballylahnich,’ or whatever it was.  Then he would draw himself up to the height of a round tower, and begin, ’Men of Ballylahnich, I rejoice to meet you!  Often has the great Liberator said to me, with tears in his voice, ’Oh would I might find myself face to face with the noble men of Ballylahnich!”

“A great man he is, a great man!

“Did you ever hear how he courted the heiress?  He walked up and down in front of her house, and threatened to fight every man that came to call, till he drove them all away!”

A good story of more recent date, I must also note, of a well-known priest in Dublin, who being asked by Mr. Balfour one day whether the people under his charge took for gospel all the rawhead and bloody-bones tales about himself, replied, “Indeed, I wish they only feared and hated the devil half as much as they do you!”

In a more serious vein my Nationalist friend explained to me that for him “Home Rule” really meant an opportunity of developing the resources of Ireland under “the American system of Protection.”  About this he was quite in earnest, and recalled to me the impassioned protests made by the then Mayor of Chicago, Mr. Carter Harrison, against the Revenue Reform doctrines which I had thought it right to set forth at the great meeting of the Iroquois Club in that city in 1883.  “Of course,” he said, “you know that Mr. Harrison was then speaking not only for himself, but for the whole Irish vote of Chicago which was solidly behind him?  And not of Chicago only!  All our people on your side of the water moved against your party in 1884, and will move against it again, only much more generally, this year, because they know that the real hope of Ireland lies in our shaking ourselves free of the British Free Trade that has been fastened upon us, and is taking our life.”  I could only say that