I came over from London to bring to a head some inquiries which have too long delayed the publication of this diary.  My intention had been to go directly to Thurles, but a telegram which I received from the Archbishop of Cashel just before I left telling me that he could not be at home for the last three days of the week, I came directly here.  Nothing can be more utterly unlike the popular notions of Ireland and of Irish life than the aspect of this most smiling and beautiful region:  nothing more thoroughly Irish than its people.

* * * who is one of the most active and energetic of Irish landlords, lives part of the year abroad, but keeps up his Irish property with care, at the expense, I suspect, of his estates elsewhere.

From a noble avenue of trees, making the highway like the main road of a private park, we turned into a literal paradise of gardens.  The air was balmy with their wealth of odours.  “Oh! yes, sir,” said the coachman, with an air of sympathetic pride, “our lady is just the greatest lady in all this land for flowers!”

And for ivy, he might have added.  We drove between green walls of ivy up to a house which seemed itself to be built of ivy, like that wonderful old mansion of Castle Leod in Scotland.  Here, plainly, is another centre of “sweetness and light,” the abolition of which must make, not this region alone, but Ireland poorer in that precise form of wealth, which, as Laboulaye has shown in one of the best of his lectures, is absolutely identical with civilisation.  It is such places as this, which, in the interest of the people, justify the exemption from redistribution and resettlement, made in one of a series of remarkable articles on Ireland recently published in the Birmingham Post, of lands, the “breaking up of which would interfere with the amenity of a residence.”

* * * relations with all classes of the people here are so cordial and straightforward that he has been easily able to give me to-day, what I have sought in vain elsewhere in Ireland, an opportunity of conversing frankly and freely with several labouring men.  For obvious reasons these men, as a rule, shrink from any expression of their real feelings.  Their position is apparently one of absolute dependence either upon the farmers or the landlords, there being no other local market for their labour, which is their only stock-in-trade.  As one of them said to me to-day, “The farmers will work a man just as long as they can’t help it, and then they throw him away.”

I asked if there were no regular farm-labourers hired at fixed rates by the year?

“Oh! very few—­less now than ever; and there’ll be fewer before there’ll be more.  The farmers don’t want to pay the labourers or to pay the landlords; they want the land and the work for nothing, sir,—­they do indeed!”

“What does a farm-hand get,” I asked, “if he is hired for a long time?”

“Well, permanent men, they’ll get 6s. a week with breakfast and dinner, or 7s. maybe, with one meal; and a servant-boy, sir, he’ll get 2s. a week or may be 3s. with his board; but it’s seldom he gets it.”