cultural business, is performed in cars, each drawn by one horse. Goods are sent from one end of the kingdom to the other on these conveyances, which, though slow, are safe. I never yet heard of a car being robbed on the road, which is saying a great deal for the poorest country in Europe. The baggage of troops is conveyed upon these one-horse cars, and is never unloaded from one end of the kingdom to the other, the same horses, cars, and men going throughout the march. Those who have marched with troops in Ireland know how to appreciate an advantage which spares the perpetual knocking about of boxes, and saves the toil of packing and unpacking the baggage every day, as in England. What endless bickering and quarrelling attends the transport of baggage here! The pressing the waggons, the enormous piles of chests to be loaded each morning, and unloaded by tired men after the day's march! The sulky drivers, forced to go against their will, and the perpetual appeals to magistrates and constables.

HORSES.

IRELAND is the hell of horses: not only are they harder worked and worse fed than in any other country, but treated with more wanton barbarity. To say nothing of the jaunting cars which nominally carry six besides the driver, and are, in fact, unlimited as to numbers, but the posters and stage-coach horses are the worst-conditioned cattle in Europe. The Irish horse is naturally a most enduring and serviceable animal, superior as hacks to the English breed. Excepting the mail horses, the best on the road are those in Bianconi's cars. The establishment of this enterprising Italian originally commenced at Clonmel, but is now extending over nearly the whole of the south and south-west of Ireland. It is an admirable adaptation of the national

carriage to the purposes of quick and convenient transit, and the spirited enterprise is understood to have been productive of great and merited profit. The old Irish slow coach is a very cruel affair. I never saw horses endure the whip, and endure it with apparent indifference, like the rough-coated cattle in the Carlow coach. It was either flanking or double-thonging from beginning to end of the journey. According to the coachman they were "Skamers," the inference being that they took the punishment with affected indifference, to convince him of its absurdity and uselessness. Being a wag and addicted to figurative language, he called it “ putting the flax into them" (he might have added, the leather and the stick), and had his jokes about the comparative merits of Riga hemp and the national plant. No man living could be a better judge of the enduring qualities of whipcord than he.

Did the reader ever see the Drogheda car start from some obscure street to the north of Newgate gaol? A similar exhibition may be found in many another place in the country. What an expressively absurd, and at the same time highly national exhibition, irresistibly

ludicrous in spite of the apparent and shocking cruelty! but the full amount of cruelty could only be conceived by those who had visited the stables and seen the horses with their collars off. To describe this would make the reader sick; suffice it to say, that every sort of "raw" was there, from the recent and superficial to the deep-seated ulcer, eating daily inward to the heart. Neither were the poor creatures let alone when in the stable, but some devil's composition was applied to their sores which drove them frantic, to the infinite amusement of the thoughtless and brutal horsekeepers. There was no hope of release for these poor creatures, except by death, for they were all worked to death. There was no lower deep beyond this lowest deep of the Drogheda stables. Purchased for a few pounds, or perhaps shillings, their capability and endurance for a remunerating period was most accurately calculated, and they were "used up" as a matter of course. I am speaking of 1839, and no doubt the same system is going on in hundreds of other places, though I trust the railway has taken the cruelty-vans off this particular line of road.

But the start! it was the great daily event

of the neighbourhood, and never failed of a numerous audience. In truth, to those not in the secret, the event was comic in the extreme. No sooner were the two horses attached to the lumbering half-inside, halfoutside car, than you could tell, from the excited faces of the crowd, that some fun was expected. The coachman shook his arms free and gathered himself up for an effort. Tim placed himself on one side of them with the broom, and Larry on the other, with a short stumpy horsewhip, worn away in the service. The fat unshaved tallow-chandler opposite came with a look of interest to his door, and even the book-keeper of the coach-office put his pen behind his ear, and indulged in a grim smile. Pat and Mike arranged themselves at one hind-wheel, and Jem and Dennis at the other, while the whole army of cads opened their faces to an extent that, had their heads been inclined backward, would have made you apprehensive that all above the mouth might have fallen off, like the lid of a fiddle-case. There was only one class of persons unobservant of the fun-the beggars, who steadily kept repeating their dismal cases at the coach-window.