“Not a bit of it, sir,” he replied; “not a bit of it.  I believe, though,” he added after a moment; “I believe they do get some help to go to Australia.  But they’re mostly no good that goes that way.  The best is them that go for themselves, or their friends help them.  But there’s not so many going this year.”

When we drove away I asked * * if he had made any progress towards a signature of the agreement with the labourer’s wife.

“No; she couldn’t be got to say yes or no.  I asked her,” said * * “what reason they had for imagining that after all these years I would try to do them an injury?  She protested they never thought of such a thing; but she couldn’t be brought to say she wished her husband to sign the paper.  It’s very odd, indeed.”

I couldn’t help suspecting that the materfamilias was at the bottom of it all, and that she was bent upon going out to America to participate in the prosperity of her two daughters, who were living “like leddies” at * * in Massachusetts.

The incident recalled to me something which happened years ago when I was returning with the Storys from Rome to Boston.  Our Cunarder, in the middle of the night, off the Irish coast, ran down and instantly sank a small schooner.

In a wonderfully short time we had come-to, and a boat’s crew had succeeded in picking up and bringing all the poor people on board.  Among them was a wizened old woman, upon whom all sorts of kind attentions were naturally lavished by the ship’s company.  She could not be persuaded to go into a cabin after she had recovered from the shock and the fright of the accident, but, comforted and clothed with new and dry garments, she took refuge under one of the companion-ways, and there, sitting huddled up, with her arms about her knees, she crooned and moaned to herself, “I was near being in a wetter and a warmer place; I was near being in a wetter and a warmer place!” by the half hour together.  We found that the poor old soul had been to Liverpool to see her son off on a sailing ship as an emigrant to America.  So a subscription was soon made up to send her on our arrival to New York there to await her son.  We had some trouble in making her understand what was to be done with her, but when she finally got it fairly into her head, gleams of mingled surprise and delight came over her withered face, and she finally broke out, “Oh, then, glory be to God! it’s a mercy that I was drownded! glory be to God! and it’s the proud boy Terence will be when he gets out to America to find his poor ould mother waiting for him there that he left behind him in Liverpool, and quite the leddy with all this good gold money in her hand, glory be to God!”

On our way back to * * we passed through * * a very neat prosperous-looking town, which * * tells me is growing up on the heels of * *. * * * was one of the few places at which the “no rent” manifesto, issued by Mr. Parnell and his colleagues from their prison in Kilmainham, during the confinement of Mr. Davitt at Portland, and without concert with him, was taken up by a village curate and commended to the people.  He was arrested for it by Mr. Gladstone’s Government, and locked up for six weeks.