140 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



elaborate drawings of the larvae at every moult, from their 

 first emergence from the egg up to the pupa stage, which 

 often served to determine otherwise too closely 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-govern- 

 ment." The force of racial pride, ignorance, and impudence 

 can no further 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 century 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 



