Lismore Cathedral was almost entirely rebuilt by the second Earl of Cork three or four years after the Restoration, and has a handsome marble spire, but there is little in it to recall the Catholic times in which Lismore was a city of churches and a centre of Irish devotion.
The hostess of the "Devonshire Arms" gave me some excellent salmon, fresh from the river, and a very good dinner. She bewailed the evil days on which she has fallen, and the loss to Lismore of all that the Castle used to mean to the people. Lady Edward Cavendish had spent a short time here some little time ago, she said, and the people were delighted to have her come there. "It would be a great thing for the country if all the uproar and quarrelling could be put an end to. It did nobody any good, least of all the poor people."
From Lismore I came back by the railway through Fermoy.
PORTUMNA, GALWAY, _Feb. 28._--I left Cork by an early train to-day, and passing through the counties of Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Queen's, and King's, reached this place after dark on a car from Parsonstown. The day was delightfully cool and bright. I had the carriage to myself almost all the way, and gave up all the time I could snatch from the constantly varying and often very beautiful scenery to reading a curious pamphlet which I picked up in Dublin entitled _Pour I'Irlande._ It purports to have been written by a "Canadian priest" living at Lurgan in Ireland, and to be a reply to M. de Mandat Grancey's volume, _Chez Paddy._ It is adorned with a frontispiece representing a monster of the Cerberus type on a monument, with three heads and three collars labelled respectively "Flattery," "Famine," and "Coercion." On the pedestal is the inscription--"1800 to 1887. Erected by the grateful Irish to the English Government." The text is in keeping with the frontispiece. In a passage devoted to the "atrocious evictions" of Glenbehy in 1887, the agent of the property is represented as "setting fire with petroleum" to the houses of two helpless men, and turning out "eighteen human beings into the highway in the depth of winter." Not a word is said of the agent's flat denial of these charges, nor a word of the advice given to the agent by Sir Redvers Buller that the mortgagee ought to level the cottages occupied by trespassers, nor a word about Father Quilter's letter to Colonel Turner, branding his flock as "poor slaves" of the League, and turning them over to "Mr. Roe or any other agent" to do as he liked with them, since they could not, or would not, keep their plighted faith given through their own priest.