CHAPTER I.


DUBLIN, _Monday, Jan. 30, 1888._--I left London last night. The train
was full of people going to attend levees and drawing-rooms about to be
held at Dublin Castle.

Near Watford we lost half an hour by the breaking of a connecting-rod:
but the London and North-Western is a model railway, and we ran
alongside the pier at Holyhead exactly "on time." There is no such
railway travelling in America, excepting on the Pennsylvania Central;
and the North-Western sleeping-carriages, if less monumental and
elaborate than ours, are better ventilated, and certainly not less
comfortable.

I had expected to come upon unusual things and people in Ireland, but I
had not expected to travel thither in company with an Irish Jacobite.
Two of my fellow-passengers, chatting as they smoked their cigarettes
in the little vestibule between the cabins of the carriage, had much to
say about Lord Ashburnham, and the "Order of the White Rose," and the
Grand Mass to be celebrated to-morrow morning at the Church of the
Carmelites in London, in memory of Charles Edward Stuart, who died at
Rome in 1788, and now lies buried as Charles III., King of Great Britain
and Ireland, in the vaults of the Vatican, together with his father
"James III.," and his brother "Henry IX." One of the two was as hot and
earnest about the "Divine Right of Kings" as the parson who, less than
forty years ago, preached a sermon to prove that the great cholera
visitation of 1849 was a direct chastisement of the impiety of the Royal
Mint in dropping the letters D.G. from the first florins of Queen