beds." These want sleepers sadly, and at present the tourist, as he wanders from coffee-room to dormitory, feels very much

"Like one that treads alone

Some banquet-hall deserted,

Whose guests are fled," &c.,

and cheers his loneliness with the thought, that should Galway become (as all who care for Ireland must hope) the port for America, this solemn stillness shall depress no more. The inn forms one side of the principal Square, and, the neighbour buildings being comparatively small and dingy, resembles some grand lady, in all her crinoline, teaching the third class at a Sunday school. The grass-plat and garden are nicely kept, but their chief ornaments struck us as being rather incongruous, to wit, hydrangeas and cannon! The guns were pointed at our bedroom windows, and it really required some little resolution next morning to shave ourselves with placidity" at the cannons' mouth." Having secured places for the morrow on the Car to Clifden, specially stipulating for "the Lake side" of the conveyance, we selected a shrewd-looking lad from a crowd of candidates (the Roman candidati wore white togas in the market-place, but these young gentlemen did not), and went to see the sights. We saw a great deal that was very interesting,

and a great deal that was very dirty; we saw the traces of Spanish architecture, in quaint gateways and quadrangular courts, but were not "reminded of Seville," our only association with that city being a passionate love of marmalade; we saw Lynch's castle, and its grotesque carving is very curious; we saw the house in Deadman's Lane, where lived that Fitz-Stephen, Warden of Galway, who, according to the worst authenticated tradition, assisted at the hanging of his own son; we saw warehouses sans ware; granaries, some without grain, and others with "the meal-sacks on the whitened floor;" we saw and greatly admired Queen's College; we saw chapels and nunneries, whence the Angelus bell sounded as we passed; above all, we saw the Claddagh. Going thither, our little showman told us of the big trade in wines between this place and Spain which flourished in the good times of old, and I foolishly thought to perplex him by the inquiry, "whether much business was done in the Spanish juice line?"

"And sure," said he, "your onner must know, that was the thrade intirely. Divil a taste of anything else did they bring us, but the juist of their Spanish vines."

The Englishman who desires a new sensation should pay a visit to the Claddagh. When we arrived, the men were at sea; but the women, in their bright red petticoats, descending half-way

down the uncovered leg, their cloaks worn like the Spanish mantilla, and of divers colours, their headkerchiefs and hoods, were grouped among the old grey ruins where the fish market is held, and formed a tableau not to be forgotten. Though their garments are torn, and patched, and discoloured, there is a graceful simple dignity about them which might teach a lesson

to Parisian milliners; and to my fancy the most becoming dress in all the world is that of a peasant girl of Connamara. Compare it, reader, with our present mode, and judge. Look at the two,

DL

sculptor, and say which will you carve? Say, when "Santa Philomena" is graved in marble, shall it be with flounces and hoops?

No, whatever may be the wrongs of Ireland, no lover of the picturesque and beautiful would wish to see her re-dressed (so far as the ladies are concerned-the gentlemen might be improved); no one would desire to see her peasant girls in the tawdry bonnets and brass-eyed boots, which stultify the faces and cripple the feet of the daughters of our English labourers.

As to the origin of these Claddagh people, I am not sufficiently "up" in ethnology, to state with analytical exactness the details of their descent; but I should imagine them to be one-third Irish, one-third Arabian, and the other Zingaro, or Spanish gypsy.* I thought that I recognised in one old lady an Ojibbeway chief, who frightened me a good deal in my childhood, but she had lost the expression of ferocity, and I was, perhaps, mistaken.

The men are all fishermen (very clumsy ones, according to Miss Martineau, who talks about harpoons as if they were crochet needles, in her interesting "Letters from Ireland");

* Wales is represented by the Joneses. The original John may have come over with Thomas Joyce, who was good enough to appropriate "the Joyce Country" to himself and family, in the reign of Edward the First.

but they give up their cargoes to the women on landing, only stipulating that from the proceeds they may be supplied with a good store of drink and tobacco, and so get due compensation on the shore for their unvarying sobriety at sea.

They live (some 1500 souls in all) in a village of miserable cabins, the walls of mud and stone, and for the most part windowless, the floors damp and dirty, and the roofs a mass of rotten straw and weeds. The poultry mania-(and if it is not mania to give ten guineas for a bantam, in what does insanity consist? *) - must be here at its height, for the cocks and hens roost in the parlour. But "the swells" of the Claddagh are its pigs. They really have not only a “landed expression," as though the place belonged to them, but a supercilious gait and mien; and with an autocratic air, as though repeating to themselves the spirited verses of Mr. A. Selkirk, they go in and out, whenever and wherever they please. I saw one of them, bold as the beast who upset Giotto,† knock

* This form of delirium is by no means of modern origin. Opviloμavia, a passionate love of rare birds, was known among the ladies of Athens.

+ We read in Lanzi's History of Painting, that as Giotto was walking with his friends, one Sunday, in the Via del Cocomero, at Florence, he was overthrown by a pig running between his legs. Whereupon the painter, albeit he was in his best clothes, philosophically recognised a just retribution, "for," said he, "although I have earned many thousand crowns with the bristles of these animals, I never gave to one of them a spoonful of swill in my life!"