It was at vespers that we entered it, and found it filled with the kneeling people.  This noble church is rather ignobly hidden away behind crowded houses and shops, and the contrast was very striking when we emerged from its dim religious space and silence into the thronged and rather noisy streets.  There is a statue here of Father Mathew; but what I have seen to-night makes me doubt whether the present generation of Corkonians would have erected it.

At dinner a gentleman gave us a most interesting account of the picturesque home which a man of taste, and a lover of natural history, has made for himself at the remote seaside village of Belmullet, in Mayo, the seat of the Mayo quarries, in which Mr. Davitt takes so much interest.  The sea brings in there all sorts of wreckage, and the house is beautifully finished with mahogany and other rare woods, just as I remember finding in a noble mansion in South Wales, near a dangerous head-land, some magnificent doors and wainscotings made of that most beautiful of the Central American woods, nogarote, which I never saw in the United States, excepting in a superb specimen of it sent home by myself from Corinto.  This colonist of Mayo employs all the people he can get in the fisheries there, which are very rich; and the ducks and wild geese are so numerous that he sometimes sends as far as to Wicklow for men to capture and sell them for him.  He was once fortunate enough to trap a pair of the snow geese of the Arctic region, but Belmullet, in other respects a primeval paradise, is cursed with the small boy of civilisation; and one of these pests of society slew the goose with a stone.  The widowed gander consoled himself by contracting family ties with the common domestic goose of the parish, and all his progeny, in other particulars indistinguishable from that familiar bird, bear the black marks distinctive of the Arctic tribe.

Belmullet, this gentleman tells me, boasts a very good little inn, kept by a Mrs. Deehan, which was honoured by a visit from Lord Carnarvon with his wife and daughters during the Earl’s Viceroyalty.  This was in the course of a private and personal, not official tour, during which, Lord Carnarvon says, he was everywhere received with the greatest courtesy by all sorts and conditions of the people.  It is an interesting illustration of the temper in which certain priests in Ireland deal with matters of State, that when Lord Carnarvon politely invited the parish priest of Belmullet to come to see him, that functionary declined to do so.  Upon this the placable Viceroy sent to know whether the priest would receive the visit he refused to pay.  The priest replied that he never declined to receive any gentleman who wished to see him; and the Viceroy accordingly called upon him, to the edification of the people, who afterwards listened very respectfully to a little speech which His Excellency made to them from a car.  It is rather surprising that these incidents have never been adduced in proof of Lord Carnarvon’s determination to take the Home Rule wind out of the sails of the Liberals!