i 4 o MY LIFE 



often served to determine otherwise tooclosely allied species. 

 We had only met once forty years before, but had occasion- 

 ally corresponded on entomological subjects and felt quite as 

 old friends. Mr. Edwards had some literary tastes and had 

 a pretty good library, so that in the intervals of work and 

 talk I spent many hours reading- He had lived twenty-five 

 years in this valley, where he had been among the first to 

 work the coal, and was still business manager of some of the 

 mines. He confirmed what Judge Holman had told me about 

 the Irish, who, he said, were industrious and very intelligent 

 and enterprising, many of them rising to high positions. As 

 workmen they are, in his opinion, better than the Welsh, and 

 equal to the Germans. And these are the people we have for 

 a century driven out of their native country by despotic 

 rule and the cruel oppression of absentee landlordism, and 

 still declare to be " incapable of self-government." The 

 force of racial pride, ignorance, and impudence can no fur- 

 ther go. 



During several drives and walks I saw a good deal of the 

 country and population. The villages and detached houses 

 were usually very poor and untidy, fences and pigsties are 

 built of odd bits of board, and there were hardly any gardens 

 or cultivation of any kind, the result probably of the people 

 being mostly miners and mere temporary residents. In one 

 village, however, where the miners owned their own cottages, 

 these were neat and sometimes pretty, in good repair, and 

 with gardens well attended to. Here, again, the magic of 

 property (or of permanent occupation) turns a hovel into a 

 home, a desert into a garden — as Arthur Young remarked 

 more than a centruy ago. 



On the 13th of April at 8.30 A. M. I bade farewell to Mr. 

 Edwards, his daughter and son, who had made my visit a 

 very agreeable one, and went on to Cincinnati. The journey 

 was very interesting. For a long way it was through a series 

 of small valleys bounded by low vertical bluffs and sandstone, 

 and with many lateral valleys opening out of them, with 

 wooded slopes above. In the flat valley-bottoms the white- 

 washed American planes were abundant, and in the villages 



