while she looks on Paddy, and Paddy looks on himself,

66

Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma?"

On several occasions, in different places in Ireland, I made some inquiries respecting this oldclothes system. I was not surprised to find it constituting an active branch of both the local and the external commerce of the country, and the source of enormous profits to the traffickers. There seems to be a regular system followed by the vendors of old clothes in furbishing them up for the market. However greasy, or old, or threadbare, they continue to put a nap and a gloss upon them, so that, like Burns' Cottar's wife, they

"Gar auld claes look amaist as weel's the new;"

and then sell their rotten gear in complete suits, at the attractive prices of 35s., 20s., 10s., or even of 58. each. In the south of Ireland these old clothes come from Bristol or Liverpool; in the north they come from Edinburgh and Glasgow to Londonderry and Belfast. A retail dealer in these articles told me that his great wholesale correspondent in this line, who had establishments both in Dublin and Belfast, had realised a fortune of 60,000l. by this traffic, and had recently become the purchaser of one of the large Encumbered estates!

Similar inquiries among the shoemakers assured me that the use of shoes had been gradually increasing among the poorer classes. Nearly all the

young women, who usually go barefooted except on fair-days, holidays, and Sundays, have, for the most part, both boots and shoes; and in towns, in these northern parts, bare feet, even on ordinary occasions, are the exception, not the rule. An old shoemaker in Enniskillen of forty years' standing, assured me that there were now three times as many shoes worn as there were thirty years ago. This old man mentioned a circumstance in regard to shoes, which seems hard to account for, even if it were only partially true: he said that in the great year of distress, 1848, he and his brother-shoemakers continued to have plenty of work, while the tailors in the same place t-totally failed! Are shoes a greater necessary of life than clothes?

I have already remarked, more than once, how much Indian flour had become a part of the food of the people in Ireland. Finding it as much in use here as elsewhere, I had the curiosity to inquire of a large dealer in grain and flour of all kinds, as to the relative sale among the people of Enniskillen of the various kinds of meal. He informed me, in the first place, that since the period of the failure of the potato crop, he has sold from thirty to fifty times as much grain meal, of one kind or other, as previously to that period. He sells about four fifths of Indian meal for one fifth of oatmeal and flour respectively. He does not sell nearly so much barley meal as amounts to one half of either the

flour or oatmeal sold. Indian meal has the advantage of being cheaper, and of being supposed to be more nutritious than either flour or oatmeal. sells at present at 1s. 1d. per stone, while oatmeal is 1s. 4d.

It

To conclude the notices of my gleanings in Enniskillen, I will here set down, by way of counterpart to my Sligo-labourer's views, the opinions of an Enniskillen-shopkeeper, on some of the sources of the miseries of Ireland, and on some of her worst grievances. Both Catholics, it will be seen how they differ-according to the point of elevation of the observer. The shopkeeper dwelt mainly on the following circumstances:

1. Inherent want of enterprise in Irishmen themselves, leading them to hoard money when they should use it in business.

2. Want of capital, or its too restricted employment by the possessors and occupiers of land.

3. Absenteeism, and the consequent substitution of agents for the natural lords of the people.

4. Too high rent of land and want of leases, and consequent ill-treatment of the tenantry in various ways. 5. Toryism and Orangeism and Protestantism of the magistrates, all existing in great disproportion to the amount of opposite views in religion and politics among the great majority of the people.

6. The monster grievance of the church: the payment of tithes to the clergy of a hostile creed;

the perpetual upholding before the eyes of the Catholic clergy and laity of the badges of the triumph of a foreign religion, while their own religion and its professors are condemned to degradation and poverty.

The two lakes of Enniskillen-the Upper and Lower Lough Erne-are justly ranked among the finest of Ireland. The Upper Lake is said to be eight miles and a half in extreme length, and three miles and three fourths in extreme breadth; and the Lower, twelve miles and a half by five and a half. They are both profusely interspersed with islands, the Upper being said to contain 90, and the Lower 109. Both are magnificent pieces of water, and most of their shores are extremely beautiful, rich with fine woods or green slopes or cultivated fields, and bounded in some places with hills of considerable height. But they want entirely the glorious mountains those adjuncts which render Killarney so grand as well as beautiful, and which superadd sublimity to many of the Scottish lochs.

The numerous islands in both the lakes, for the most part richly wooded, give a romantic and poetical cast to the landscape; but in the Upper Lake their size and frequent closeness to one another, detract considerably from that essential charm of a lake, a free expanse of mirrored water. Mr. Otway has well expressed this defect in the following sentence: "The great fault of Upper

Lough Erne is, that it is too much encumbered with hilly islands, so as to give you rather the idea of a hilly country, with its lowlands flooded, than of a broad sweeping expanse of lake."

I took a boat at Enniskillen, early in the morning of a beautiful day, and was rowed up the Lower Lake as far as Ely Lodge, a seat of the Marquess of Ely-a distance of about six or seven miles. All this portion of the lake is exceedingly beautiful, the wooded islands adding greatly to the richness of the scene, without, in any way, destroying the fine effect of the wide-spreading water. The hilly shores are completely wooded on the southern side, and on the north are, for the most part, green or cultivated slopes of almost equal beauty.

I landed on Lord Ely's domain, which I believe is an island, though I could not discover its watery limit on the land side. It is, I understand, separated from the main land only by so small a line of water as can be spanned by a bridge. As this island is of considerable height, and the house (Ely Lodge) built on its summit, I expected to get a fine view of the upper portion of the lake from it; such expectation being, indeed, the chief motive of my visit to it. On reaching the house, however, I was completely disappointed; not a glimpse of the lake being visible from even its upper windows; so high had the wood been permitted to grow up around it, and not a vista left through which the eye could find its object.