imaginative Celt--as he listens to the gossip about the changes, the
marriages, and the deaths that have taken place since he left "home
"--for a brief moment lives once more upon "the old sod," and sees
visions of the little cabin by the wood side where dwelt those he loved,
of the mountain chapel where he worshipped, of a bright-eyed Irish girl
beloved in the golden days of youth. These and a host of other
associations of the past come floating back upon his memory, as he hears
the tidings brought by Terence, or Michael, or Maurya, who has just
"come over." It often so happens that, from the very goodness of the
Irish heart, the newcomers are frequently drawn into the same miserable
mode of life as the friends who have come to England before them may
have fallen into.

Irish intellect and Irish courage have in thousands of cases brought our
people to their proper place in the social scale, but it is only too
often the case that adverse circumstances compel the great bulk of them
to have recourse to the hardest, the most precarious, and the worst paid
employments to be found in the British labour market.

In the large towns, in the poorer streets in which our people live, a
stranger would be struck by the swarms of children, and of an evening,
at the number of grown-up people sitting on the doorsteps of their
wretched habitations. John Barry once told me that a friend of his
asked one of these how they could live in such places? "Because," was
the reply, "we live so much _out_ of them." The answer showed, at any
rate, that their lot was borne cheerfully.

Nevertheless, there are Irishmen too--men who know how to keep what they
have earned--who, by degrees, get into the higher circles of the
commercial world, so that I have seen among the merchant princes "on