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or
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cattle, sheep, or horses. I was citing to a Mayo-man this defect of the so-called farmer, and was at once met by a prompt reply. The tendency to graze cattle, which is not hard work, and to
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about to cattle fairs, which are esteemed the greatest diversion the country affords, is an indication of the distinct superiority of the quick-witted Celt to the dull Saxon hind. An Irish peasant cultivator is a being of greater faculty of expansion than Wessex Hodge. He is profoundly ignorant and absurdly superstitious, but he is naturally keen-witted, and his innate gifts are brightened by contact with his fellow man. He is not a ploughman, for he often cultivates with the spade alone, and he has, besides his oats, his potatoes, his cabbages, and mayhap a few turnips, and a variety of animals, all of which he understands--or misunderstands. If a holder of twenty or thirty, or, still better, forty acres, he will have a horse, a cow, a beast or two, a few sheep, and some turkeys and geese. It is possible to have all these on fifteen acres or less of fairly good land, and then the Western peasant cultivator becomes a many-sided man by dint of buying and selling stock--that is, he acquires the sort of intelligence possessed by a smart huckster. This is held to be cleverness in these parts, and undoubtedly gives its possessor a greater
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than the career of an Essex or Wessex ploughman or carter. But what is peculiarly pertinent to the burning question of peasant cultivators and proprietors is the tendency, perpetually visible in the Western Irishman, to fly off at a tangent from agriculture to grazing. According to an ancient and indurated belief in all this section of the country, animals ought to get fat on the pasture provided by nature. I am told that thirty years ago there was not a plough in existence from Westport to Dhulough, and that the turnip was an unknown vegetable in Connemara. The notion of growing turnips and mangolds in a country made for root crops was at first not well received.
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Bastes had done hitherto on the rough mountain pasture