PORTUMNA, GALWAY, Feb. 28.—­I left Cork by an early train to-day, and passing through the counties of Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Queen’s, and King’s, reached this place after dark on a car from Parsonstown.  The day was delightfully cool and bright.  I had the carriage to myself almost all the way, and gave up all the time I could snatch from the constantly varying and often very beautiful scenery to reading a curious pamphlet which I picked up in Dublin entitled Pour I’Irlande. It purports to have been written by a “Canadian priest” living at Lurgan in Ireland, and to be a reply to M. de Mandat Grancey’s volume, Chez Paddy. It is adorned with a frontispiece representing a monster of the Cerberus type on a monument, with three heads and three collars labelled respectively “Flattery,” “Famine,” and “Coercion.”  On the pedestal is the inscription—­“1800 to 1887.  Erected by the grateful Irish to the English Government.”  The text is in keeping with the frontispiece.  In a passage devoted to the “atrocious evictions” of Glenbehy in 1887, the agent of the property is represented as “setting fire with petroleum” to the houses of two helpless men, and turning out “eighteen human beings into the highway in the depth of winter.”  Not a word is said of the agent’s flat denial of these charges, nor a word of the advice given to the agent by Sir Redvers Buller that the mortgagee ought to level the cottages occupied by trespassers, nor a word about Father Quilter’s letter to Colonel Turner, branding his flock as “poor slaves” of the League, and turning them over to “Mr. Roe or any other agent” to do as he liked with them, since they could not, or would not, keep their plighted faith given through their own priest.

This sort of ostrich fury is common enough among the regular drumbeaters of the Irish agitation.  But it is not creditable to a “Canadian priest.”  Still less creditable is his direct arraignment of M. de Mandat Grancey’s good faith and veracity upon the strength of what he describes as M. de Mandat Grancey’s amplification and distortion of a story told by himself.  This was a tale of a priest called out to confess one of his parishioners.  The penitent accused himself of killing one man, and trying to kill several others.  The priest, as the dreadful tale went on, made a tally on his sleeve, with chalk, of the crimes recited.  “Good heavens! my son,” he cried at last, “what had all these men done to you that you tried to send them all into eternity?  Who were they?”

“Oh, Father, they were all bailiffs or tax-collectors!”

“You idiot!” exclaimed the confessor, angrily rubbing at his sleeve, “why didn’t ye tell me that before instead of letting me spoil my best cassock?”