There is a genealogy here of the M’Morroghs and Kavanaghs, most gorgeously and elaborately gotten up many years ago for Mr. Kavanagh’s grandfather, which shows how soon the Norman and the native strains of blood become commingled.  When one remembers how much Norman blood must have gone even into far-off Connaught when King John, in the early part of the thirteenth century, coolly gave away that realm of the O’Connors to the De Burgos, and how continually the English of the Pale fled from the exactions inflicted upon them by their own people, and sought refuge “among the savage and mere Irish,” one cannot help thinking that the” Race Question” has been “worked for at least all it is worth” by philosophers bent on unravelling the ‘snarl’ of Irish affairs.  If this genealogy may be trusted, there was little to choose between the ages which immediately preceded and the ages which followed the Anglo-Norman invasion in the matter of respect for human life.  Celtic chiefs and Norman knights “died in their boots” as regularly as frontiersmen in Texas.  One personage is designated in the genealogy as “the murderer,” for the truly Hibernian reason, so far as appears, that he was himself murdered while quite a youth, and before he had had a chance to murder more than three or four of his immediate relatives.  It was as if the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Lady Constance should be branded in history as “Arthur, the Assassin.”

BORRIS, March 4th.—­This is a staunch Protestant house, and Mr. Kavanagh himself reads a Protestant service every morning.  But there is little or nothing apparently in this part of Ireland of the bitter feeling about and against the Catholics which exists in the North.  A very lively and pleasant Catholic gentleman came in to-day informally and joined the house party at luncheon.  We all walked out over the property afterwards, visiting quite a different region from that which we saw yesterday—­different but equally beautiful and striking, and this Catholic gentleman cited several cases which had fallen within his own knowledge of priests who begin to feel their moral control of the people slipping away from them through the operation of the “Plan of Campaign.”  I told him what I had heard in regard to one such priest from my ecclesiastical friend in Cork.  “It does not surprise me at all,” he said, “and, indeed, I not very long ago read precisely such another letter from a priest in a somewhat similar position.  I read it with pain and shame as a Catholic,” he continued, “for it was simply a complete admission that the priest, although entirely convinced that his parishioners were making most unfair demands upon their landlord to whom the letter was addressed, felt himself entirely powerless to bring them to a sense of their misconduct.”  “Had this priest given in his adhesion to the Plan of Campaign?” I asked.  “Yes,” was the reply, “and it was this fact which had broken his hold on the people when he tried to bring them to abandon their attitude under the Plan.  His letter was really nothing more nor less than an appeal to the landlord, and that landlord a Protestant, to help him to get out of the hole into which he had put himself.”