After we got back I spent half-an-hour with a gentleman who knows the country about Youghal, which I propose to visit to-morrow, and who saw something of the recent troubles there arising out of the Plan of Campaign, as put into effect on the Ponsonby property.

He is of the opinion that the Nationalists were misled into this contest by bad information as to Mr. Ponsonby’s resources and relations.  They expected to drive him to the wall, but they will fail to do this, and failing to do this they will be left in the vocative.  He showed me a curious souvenir of the day of the evictions, in the shape of a quatrain, written by the young wife of an evicted tenant.  This young woman, Mrs. Mahoney, was observed by one of the officers, as the eviction went on, to go apart to a window, where she stood for a while apparently writing something on a wooden panel of the shutter.  After the eviction was over the officer remembered this, and going up to the window found these lines pencilled upon the panel:—­

    “We are evicted from this house,
        Me and my loving man;
    We’re homeless now upon the world! 
        May the divil take ’the Plan’!”

CORK, Monday, Feb. 27.—­A most interesting day.  I left alone and early by the train for Youghal, having sent before me a letter of introduction to Canon Keller, the parish priest, who has recently become a conspicuous person through his refusal to give evidence about matters, his knowledge of which he conceives to be “privileged,” as acquired in his capacity as a priest.

I had many fine views of the shore and the sea as we ran along, and the site of Youghal itself is very fine.  It is an old seaport town, and once was a place of considerable trade, especially in wool.

Oliver dwelt here for a while, and from Youghal he embarked on his victorious return to England.  He seems to have done his work while he was here “not negligently,” like Harrison at Naseby Field, for when he departed he left Youghal a citadel of Protestant intolerance.  Even under Charles II they maintained an ordinance forbidding “any Papist to buy or barter anything in the public markets,” which may be taken as a piece of cold-blooded and statutory “boycotting.”  Then there was no parish priest in Youghal; now it may almost be said there is nobody in Youghal but the parish priest!  So does “the whirligig of time bring in his revenges”!

At Youghal station a very civil young man came up, calling me by name, and said Father Keller had sent him with a car to meet me.  We drove up past some beautiful grounds into the main street.  A picturesque waterside town, little lanes and narrow streets leading out of the main artery down to the bay, and a savour of the sea in the place, grateful doubtless to the souls of Raleigh and the west country folk he brought over here when he became lord of the land, just three hundred years ago.  Edmund Spenser came here in those days to see him, and talk over the events of that senseless rising of the Desmonds, which gave the poet of the “Faerie Queen” his awful pictures of the desolation of Ireland, and made the planter of Virginia master of more than forty thousand acres of Irish land.