At Moira, which stands very prettily above the Ulster Canal, a small army of people returning from a day in the country to Belfast came upon us and trebled the length of our train.  We picked up more at Lisburn, where stands the Cathedral Church of Jeremy Taylor, the “Shakespeare of divines.”  Here my only companion in the compartment from Dublin left me, a most kindly, intelligent Ulster man, who had very positive views as to the political situation.  He much commended the recent discourse in Scotland of a Presbyterian minister, who spoke of the Papal Decree as “pouring water on a drowned mouse,” a remark which led me to elicit the fact that he had never seen either Clare or Kerry; and he was very warm in his admiration of Mr. Chamberlain.  He told me, what I had heard from many other men of Ulster, that the North had armed itself thoroughly when the Home Rule business began with Mr. Gladstone.  “I am a Unionist,” he said, “but I think the Union is worth as much to England as it is to Ireland, and if England means to break it up it is not the part of Irishmen who think and feel as I do to let her choose her own time for doing it, and stand still while she robs us of our property and turns us out defenceless to be trampled under foot by the most worthless vagabonds in our own island.”  He thinks the National League has had its death-blow.  “What I fear now,” he said, “is that we are running straight into a social war, and that will never be a war against the landlords in Ireland; it’ll be a war against the Protestants and all the decent people there are among the Catholics.”

He was very cordial when he found I was an American, and with that offhand hospitality which seems to know no distinctions of race or religion in Ireland urged me to come and make him a visit at a place he has nearer the sea-coast.  “I’ll show you Downpatrick,” he said, “where the tombs of St. Patrick and St. Bridget and St. Columb are, the saints sleeping quite at their ease, with a fine prosperous Presbyterian town all about them.  And I’ll drive you to Tullymore, where you’ll see the most beautiful park, and the finest views from it all the way to the Isle of Man, that are to be seen in all Ireland.”  He was very much interested in the curious story of the sequestration of the remains of Mr. Stewart of New York, who was born, he tells me, at Lisburn, where the wildest fabrications on the subject seem to have got currency.  That this feat of body-snatching is supposed to have been performed by a little syndicate of Italians, afterwards broken up by the firmness of Lady Crawford in resisting the ghastly pressure to which the widow and the executors of Mr. Stewart are believed to have succumbed, was quite a new idea to him.

From Moira to Belfast the scenery along the line grows in beauty steadily.  If Belfast were not the busiest and most thriving city in Ireland, it would still be well worth a visit for the picturesque charms of its situation and of the scenery which surrounds it.  At some future day I hope to get a better notion both of its activity and of its attractions than it would be possible for me to attempt to get in this flying visit, made solely to take the touch of the atmosphere of the place at this season of the year; for we are on the very eve of the battle month of the Boyne.