190 A YEAE OP LIBERTY ; OE, 



weapons, is also likely ; but what they did with the general cargoes I 

 cannot imagine. The country is a thousand times more rich now than 

 it was then ; and where the merchants found customers, or how the 

 customers found money oh ! I give it up ; 'tis worse than the Pons 

 Asinorum. The railway hotel, which occupies one side of the 

 principal square, is perhaps the largest in Ireland, Killarney excepted. 

 Here, in 1859, only seven short years ago, poor Leech penned some 

 of his amusing sketches. " He saw," he says, " whilst lionising the 

 town, a great deal that was very amusing, and a great deal that was 

 very dirty." He saw traces of Spanish architecture in quaint gate- 

 ways and quadrangular courts ; he saw Lynch's Castle, and found its 

 grotesque carving very curious ; he saw the house in Dead Man's 

 Lane, where lived Fitz-Stephen, Warden of Galway ; he saw ware- 

 houses without ware ; he saw and greatly admired Queen's College ; 

 he saw chapels and nunneries, whence the Angelus bell sounded as 

 he passed ; and, above all, he saw the '' Claddagh." About this dirty 

 suburb pages have been written ; it is simply the fishermen's quarter, 

 consisting of poor, ruinous cabins, " with walls of mud and stone, 

 and for the most part, windowless, the floors damp and dirty, and 

 the roof a mass of rotten straw and weeds." *' As to the origin of 

 these Claddagh people, I am not sufiSciently ' up ' in ethnology to 

 state with analytical exactness the details of their descent, but I 

 imagine them to be one-third Irish, one-third Arabian, and the other 

 Zingaro or Spanish gipsy. I thought I recognised in the 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." 



In this work the reader has rarely been troubled with quotations. 

 Personally I abhor them, and should certainly avoid the society of 

 my best friend if he had a predilection for inflicting bad Latin and 

 worse Greek on a trusting comrade. Yet in this chapter I have not 

 only quoted from the sparkling pages of Leech, but have been picking 

 and stealing from the heavy wisdom of the Ordnance survey. The 

 fact is, I do not like the task before me, and for once in my life 

 avoid the river like an insane dog. Internally, no mortal is more 



