and in the companion - way ran into General Skeen; while seeking for tables in the saloon, we found other Wasa-force folk.

So 88 Bombay dropped astern, we searched out longforgotten boiled shirts and oreased dress-suits, and went down to & many course dinner amid shimmer and rustle of satin and silk, buzz of voices, and all the longforgotten sights and sounds of oivilisation.

We had all of us past experience of returns from war, and, needless to say, did not expect bands and red carpets or even the flowers that London flung into the ambulance cars in '15. But perhaps some of us had faint ideas that upon occasion we might be people of potential interest, and that should the subject of the frontier arise, less travelled folk (especially the fair sex) might say: "Oh, you're from Waziristan! How interesting! Do tell us something about it."

If you have struggled over a painful path off the beaten track, I suppose it is only

human nature to imagine that others may sometimes like to hear about it. Not that we raised the subjectfar from it. But we were prepared to talk if called upon.

It was therefore doubtless for our proper and final chastening that the cavalryman and I fell in with the commercial magnate at evening drink-time. After the manner of travellers, he inquired whence we had come; and the cavalryman, with possibly recollections of the Ahnai and half a dozen more fights at the back of his mind, answered modestly, "Waziristan."

The magnate puckered his brow as though in doubt, and then with a flash of remembrance, replied

Ah, yes. There's going to be a show up there soon, isn't there?"

Through a haze I heard the cavalryman, a temperate soul, who drinks mostly water as a rule, call to the waiter for two large brandies and small sodas, ere he deftly turned the conversation into the paths of the fluctuation of the rupee.

I HAVE been thinking a good deal lately of an anecdote related by the late W. R. Le Fanu in his 'Seventy Years of Irish Life,' a book witty enough to be worthy of the great-grandson of Sheridan. The anecdote concerns Whately, when that distinguished scholar and logician was Archbishop of Dublin. The prelate was an able man, but eccentric; and one of his eccentricities was a habit when entertaining his clergy of laying down in an authoritative voice paradoxes which always startled, and sometimes shocked, his hearers. Having accomplished this, which was his object, and after the puzzled clergymen had silently revolved in their minds the strange saying for a sufficient time, the Arohbishop would proceed to explain it in such a way as to show that it was merely a truism turned inside out.

Once at a luncheon given at his palace in Stephen's Green to some of his olergy, his grace gave a sample of this habit of his. Speaking in a loud voice, which silenced all other talk at the table, he said, "Is it not strange that there should be no connection between religion and morality?" The confused and speechless spell, which usually settled upon the audience after such an observation as this from their Archbishop, was on

this occasion broken by a louder voice from the other end of the table. "If your Grace means," it said, "that there are heathen religions which have no connection with morality, it is a truism; but if your Grace means that there is ne connection between the Christian religion and morality, it is false." It was the Archbishop's turn this time to become silent-and angry. He gave no explanation of his statement; and perhaps he was right. For once he had met more than his match: the speaker was the Rev. John Jellett, then a youthful Fellow, and later 8 distinguished Provest, of Trinity College, Dublin.

Still I am sorry that Jellett's reply prevented Whately's explanation of his saying. And what I have been thinking of lately is what that explanation would have been. Is it possible he would have justified his proposition by pointing to the state of affairs in the land of his hearers' birth and of his adoption, Erin, the Isle of Saints?

To any one who knows that land there can be no doubt as to the fervour and devotion with which the working-class non-Saxon part of the popula tion cherish their brand of the Christian religion. Not very long ago I spent a Sunday in Dublin. The evening before I

arrived an inoffensive policeman, himself an ardent Catholic, had been shot down in the open street by two or three assassins in the presence of scores of passers-by who made no attempt to interfere. The half-dozen bullets which had passed through the victim's body had left their marks on the neighbouring walls. That Sunday was, I believe, some very holy day-it was, I know, a very wet one; and as I I passed along the quays of the Liffey in the forenoon I came to a Catholic Church where divine service was being oelebrated. Every seat in the Church was filled with worshippers; every passage and corner of it were crammed by them; while outside the Church the quay was blocked by a mass of devotees who stood bareheaded in the pelting rain catching what glimpses they could get through the open doors of the ceremonies within, and waiting patiently till the exodus from the Church, which had already begun, would permit them to enter and touch their brows with holy water and make obeisance before the altar of their God.

As I say the exodus from the Church had already begun, I noticed that a large part of the worshippers coming out took a particular direction, and I followed. They went straight to the spot where the policeman had the previous night been murdered; and when they reached it, they stopped and examined and put their fingers into the bullet marks in the walls, and ex

changed jokes and pleasantries with one another before they passed on home. It was then that Archbishop Whately's remark recurred to my mind; and I began to wonder if he was thinking of the Christian religion in Ireland when he made it.

This close association of religious devotion and murder seemed to me at the time very strange; but since then Irish piety has been seen in other stranger associations. Lately a Lord Mayor of Cork, who was at least reasonably suspected of being connected with a gang of murderers, starved himself to death in Brixton Prison. While he did so, hundreds of Irish Catholics outside the walls were counting their beads and reciting their prayers for the benefit of his soul; and, after he had done so, his body was taken to a Catholic Cathedral for further religious services with a lie inscribed on the coffin-that he had been "murdered by the foreigner. Again, lately, a young student, found guilty of being party to the murder of three soldiers as young as himself, was hanged at Mountjoy Prison; and again beads were counted and prayers were recited outside the walls for the repose of the soul of the convicted murderer.

All the other commandments, except perhaps the one which refers to bearing false witness, are as well, and some are much better, observed by the proletariat non-Saxon Irish as by most other peoples confessing and calling them

selves Christians; but the command "Thou shalt do no murder" seems never to have reached Irish ears. The distinotion they make between homicide and other offences, generally regarded as much less heinous in other so-called civilised societies, is sometimes sufficiently startling. Years ago I was told by an elderly English barrister, who was the son of an Irish landowner, an experience of his youth which I scarcely credited then, but which I fully believe

He was returning home from England for a holiday, and as Ireland was as usual in a "disturbed" condition, he thought it prudent to carry a pistol with him. He was met at a roadside railway station by a jaunting-oar driven by one of his father's "beys." As it was a dark night and a lonely road, he took his pistol out of his pocket and put it in the "well" of the ear ready for instant use. On reaching home, the warm welcome which was awaiting him put out of his mind all memory of his pistol; but the next morning his recollection returned and he went to the car to get it. It was gone. Rather angry, he concluded that the boy must have stolen it, and he went to the boy's mother's cabin and told her so. The mother was furious at the charge. She took the pistol out of a cupboard and handed it back to its owner. "There's it for ye," she said, while her dark eyes flashed fire; "an' don't you be so riddy agin, sor, to call my bhoy a thafe. He

only borrowed yer pistol for the night to thry and shoot a neighbour on his way home."

This amazing contempt for the sanctity of human life among a labouring class, deeply religious and otherwise as virtuous as their fellows in other lands, and, in most relations of society, kindly and even generous, is at present perplexing the people of Great Britain and their Parliament. Both seem to think that the constant butcheries of policemen and soldiers can originate in nothing but an overwhelming sense of injustice, and both also seem to think it is a phenomenon of yesterday's growth. I venture to say they are mistaken both as to its birth and as to its age. It is not the creature of oppression, and it is a modern survival of ancient society in Ireland.

To take the latter point first, I will go back no farther than one hundred and sixty years: I might go back one thousand and sixty.

About the peasant revolt in South Ireland in 1760 Arthur Young wrote as follows:

"The Whiteboys began in Tipperary. It was a common practice with them to go in parties about the country, swearing many to be true to them, and forcing them to join by menaces which they very often carried into exeeution. At last they set up to be general redressers of grievances-punished all obnoxious persons who advanced the value of lands or held farms over their head; and

having taken the administration of justice into their own hands, were not very exact in the distribution of it. They forced masters to release their apprentices, carried off the daughters of rich farmers, ravished them into marriages, levied sums of money on the middling and lower farmers in order to support their cause in defending prosecutions against them, and many of them subsisted without work, supported by by these prosecutions. Sometimes they committed considerable robberies, breaking into houses, and taking money under pretence of redressing grievances. In the course of these outrages they burned several houses, and destroyed the whole substance of those obnoxious to them. The barbarities they committed were shocking. One of their usual punishments, and by no means the most severe, was taking people out of their beds, carrying them naked in winter on horseback for some distance, and burying them up to their chin in a hole with briers, not forgetting to out off one of their ears."

That is the description of the practices followed by the non-Saxon peasants in 1760, by an Englishman who was a sharp observer but a warm friend of the peasants. Later, by some sixty years, an Irishman, as sharp an observer and an even warmer friend of the peasants, in a series of sketches of his experiences on the Leinster Circuit, gives a picture more concrete but not in the

least

different from that painted by Arthur Young. Lalor Sheil, writing of the assizes in Tipperary in 1827, gives us graphically and in detail accounts of a number of murder trials. The first is the "Murder at Holycross." There a land agent-who seems to have treated the farmers with fairness — was murdered before many spectators by one Patrick Grace. Grace relied on the general terror of murder to prevent any of the spectators giving evidence against him. One was superior to this terror and gave evidence, and Grace was hanged. The witness was taken out of the country by the Government to save him from vengeance; but he left three brothers behind, and vengeance was duly taken on them, though they had nothing to do with their brother's evidence. He describes in a striking way how the three brothers went about their business without apprehension, while every body they met knew they were doomed to death and who were to kill them. Another was the "Burning of the Sheas," when, because one farmer claimed possession of a small potato garden which he had let to a cottier, he and his family and his servants, to the number of sixteen, were burned alive in his own house, the doors and windows of which were nailed up before the thatch was set on fire Two other cases were one of the murder of a husband by his wife's paramour, who, like Thurtell,