I had some difficulty in finding the local habitation of the “National League.”  I had been told it was in O’Connell Street, and sharing the usual and foolish aversion of my sex to asking questions on the highway, I perambulated a good many streets and squares before I discovered that it has pleased the local authorities to unbaptize Sackville Street, “the finest thoroughfare in Europe,” and convert it into “O’Connell Street.”  But they have failed so ignominiously that the National League finds itself obliged to put up a huge sign over its doorways, notifying all the world that the offices are not where they appear to be in Upper Sackville Street at all, but in “O’Connell Street.”  The effect is as ludicrous as it is instructive.  Oddly enough, they have not attempted to change the name of another thoroughfare which keeps green the “pious and immortal memory” of William III., dear to all who in England or America go in fear and horror of the scarlet woman that sitteth upon the seven hills!  There is a fashion, too, in Dublin of putting images of little white horses into the fanlights over the doorways, which seems to smack of an undue reverence for the Protestant Succession and the House of Hanover.

What you expect is the thing you never find in Ireland.  I had rather thoughtlessly taken it for granted the city would be agog with the great Morley reception which is to come off on Wednesday night.  There is a good deal about it in the Freeman’s Journal to-day, but chiefly touching a sixpenny quarrel which has sprung up between the Reception Committee and the Trades Council over the alleged making of contracts by the Committee with “houses not employing members of the regular trades.”

For this the typos and others propose to “boycott” the Committee and the Reception and the Liberators from over the sea.  From casual conversations I gather that there is much more popular interest in the release, on Wednesday, of Mr. T.D.  Sullivan, ex-Lord Mayor, champion swimmer, M.P., poet, and patriot.  A Nationalist acquaintance of mine tells me that in Tullamore Mr. Sullivan has been most prolific of poetry.  He has composed a song which I am afraid will hardly please my Irish Nationalist friends in America: 

   “We are sons of Sister Isles,
    Englishmen and Irishmen,
    On our friendship Heaven smiles;
    Tyrant’s schemes and Tory wiles
    Ne’er shall make us foes again.”

There is to be a Drawing-Room, too, at the Castle on Wednesday night.  One would not unnaturally gather from the “tall talk” in Parliament and the press that this conjuncture of a great popular demonstration in favour of Irish nationality, with a display of Dublin fashion doing homage to the alien despot, might be ominous of “bloody noses and cracked crowns.”  Not a bit of it!  I asked my jarvey, for instance, on an outside car this afternoon, whether he expected a row to result from these counter currents of the classes and the masses.  “A row!” he replied, looking around at me in amazement.  “A row is it? and what for would there be?  Shure they’ll be through with the procession in time to see the carriages!”