TWO IRISH STORIES.
[TO THR EDITOR OF THZ •srserAzoa.1
Sis,—In the Arctic weather we are now experiencing, it strikes me that it would be but kind to impart to your readers a remedy, prescribed to me with touching faith and sympathy, by a poor old man in the mountain district where I live. Seeing me suffering from an overwhelming cold in my head, he entreated me to try the following cure : "Take a tumbler of whiskey-punch, and as much butther as would lay on the top of a knife, and stir it into the punch ; and," he added, with graphic emphasis, " docthers have tould me that if I could see inside of meself, I'd see that punch and that butther driving the could fornint it, like a fog, thro' me enthrills 1"
Another story is perhaps not quite so comforting. Several winters ago, while waiting in the early morning at a small railway-junction in the South of Ireland, two rough-coated, half-peasant, half-farmer looking men came in for "an air of the fire," and as I had, somewhat selfishly, established myself right in front of the comfortless grate, they took seats one at each side of me, and continued their conversation across me. Their subject was the recent peculiarly brutal murder of an old man at Lianan. He had been shot while driving into market with his pigs, and had been left to die on the road, his head supported by his daughter. The man on my right, who was evidently a great reader of newspapers, detailed these particulars to his friend, who, when he had ended, remarked in a questioning way : "Maybe he was a land-grabber " "He was that," ad- mitted his informant. " Begorra, then," rejoined the other, "it was just the price of him." Horrified at this cool comment on such a crime, I was thinking with a shudder that my two friends were exactly the class likely to be on a jury in a murder case, when the man on my right, who had evidently a taste for sensational subjects, went on : "An' did you read in the paper about the man who went into the bank in C—, and shot the cashier, and med' off with the money?" After a pause, his friend replied in a calm, judicial tone : "Well now, times is hard, and sure a person must do some- thing " ! I confess it was a relief when at this moment the whistle of my incoming train put an end to any further reve- lations of what I knew too well was only the "public opinion
of the parish."—I am, Sir, &c., S.
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