Of this business of evictions, he said, the greatest imaginable misrepresentations are made in the press and by public speakers.  “You have just seen one eviction yourself,” he said, “and you can judge for yourself whether that can be truly described in Mr. Gladstone’s language as a ‘sentence of death.’  The people that were put out of these burned houses you saw, houses that never would have needed to be burned, had Harrington and the other Leaguers allowed the people to keep their pledges given Sir Redvers Buller, those very people are better off now than they were before they were evicted, in so far as this, that they get their food and drink and shelter without working for it, and I’m sorry to say that the Government and the League, between them, have been soliciting half of Ireland for the last six or eight years to think that sort of thing a heaven upon earth.  An eviction in Ireland in these days generally means just this, that the fight between a landlord and the League has come to a head.  If the tenant wants to be rid of his holding, or if he is more afraid of the League than of the law, why, out he goes, and then he is a victim of heartless oppression; but if he is well-to-do, and if he thinks he will be protected, he takes the eviction proceedings just for a notice to stop palavering and make a settlement, and a settlement is made.  The ordinary Irish tenant don’t think anything more of an eviction than Irish gentlemen used to think of a duel; but you can never get English people to understand the one any more than the other!”

The fine broad streets which Cork owes to the filling up and bridging over of the canals which in the last century made her a kind of Irish Venice, give the city a comely and even stately aspect.  But they are not much better kept and looked after than the streets of New York.  And they are certainly less busy and animated than when I last was here, five years ago.  All the canals, however, are not filled up or bridged over.  From my windows, in a neat comfortable little private hotel on Morrison’s Quay, I look down upon the deck of a small barque, moored well up among the houses.  The hospitable and dignified County Club is within two minutes’ walk of my hostelry, and the equally hospitable and more bustling City Club, but a little farther off, at the end of the South Mall.  At luncheon to-day a gentleman who was at Kilkenny with Mr. Gladstone on the occasion of his visit to that city told me a story too good to be lost.  The party were eight in number, and on their return to Abbeyleix they naturally looked out for an empty railway carriage.  The train was rather full, but in one compartment my informant descried a dignitary, whom he knew, of the Protestant Church of Ireland, its only occupant.  He went up and saluted the Dean, and, pointing to his companions, asked if he would object to changing his place in the train, which would give them a compartment to themselves.  The Dean courteously, and indeed briskly, assented, when he saw that Mr. Gladstone was one of the party.