As we drove along, he pointed out to me several fine stretches of hunting country, and, to my surprise, informed me that only the other day “there was as fine a meet as ever you saw, more than a hundred ladies and gentlemen—­a grand sight it was.”

I asked if the hunting had not been “put down by the League.”

“Oh, now then, sir, who’d be wanting to put down the hunting here in Galway?—­and Ballinasloe?  Were you ever at Ballinasloe? just the grandest horse fair there is in the whole wide world!”

I insisted that I had always heard a great deal about the opposition of the League to hunting.

“Oh, that’ll be some little lawyer fellow,” he replied, “like that Healy, that can’t sit on a horse!  It’s the grandest country in all the world for riding over.  What for wouldn’t they ride over it?”

“Were there many went out to America from about Loughrea?”

“Oh, yes; they were always coming and going.  But as many came back.”

“Why?”

“Oh, they didn’t like the country.  It wasn’t as good a country, was it, as old Ireland?  And they had to work too hard; and then some of them got money, and they’d like to spend it in the old place.”

The country about Woodlawn is very picturesque and well wooded, and for a long distance we followed the neatly-kept stone walls of the large and handsome park of Lord Ashtown.

“The most beautiful and biggest trees in all Ireland, sorr,” said the jarvey, “and it’s a great pity, it is, ye can’t stay to let me drive you all over it, for the finest part of the park is just what you can’t see from this road.  Oh, her ladyship would never object to any gentleman driving about to see the beauties of the place.  She is a very good woman, is her ladyship.  She gave work the last Christmas to thirty-two men, and there wasn’t another house in the country there that had work for more than ten or twelve.  A very good woman she is, indeed.”

“Yes, that is a very handsome church, it is indeed.  It is the Protestant Church.  Lord Ashtown built it; he was a very good man too, and did a power of good—­building and making roads, and giving work to the people.  He was buried there in that Castle, over the station—­Trench’s Castle, they called it.”

“All that lumber there by the station?”

“That came out of the Ashtown woods.  They were always cutting down the trees; there was so many of them you might be cutting for years—­you would never get to the end of them.”

Woodlawn Station is one of the neatest and prettiest railway stations I have seen in Ireland—­more like a picturesque stone cottage, green and gay with flowers, than like a station.  The station-master’s family of cheery well-dressed lads and lasses went and came about the bright fire in the waiting-room in a friendly unobtrusive fashion, chatting with the policeman and the porter and the passengers.  It was hard to believe one’s-self within an easy drive of the “cockpit of Ireland.”