In former years Sir John Preston used to visit Gweedore every year for sport and recreation.  He knew Lord George Hill very well, “as true and noble a man as ever lived, who stinted himself to improve the state of his tenants.”  He threw an odd light on the dreamy desire which had so much amused me of the “beauty of Gweedore” to become “a dressmaker at Derry,” by telling me that long ago the gossips there used to tell wonderful stories of a Gweedore girl who had made her fortune as a milliner in the “Maiden City.”

This morning Mr. Cameron, who as Town Inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary will be responsible for public peace and order here during the next critical fortnight, held a review of his men on a common beyond the Theological College.  About two hundred and fifty of the force were paraded, with about twenty mounted policemen, and for an hour and a half, under a tolerably warm sun, they were put through a regular military drill.  A finer body of men cannot be seen, and in point of discipline and training they can hold their own, I should say, with the best of her Majesty’s regiments.  Without such discipline and training it would not be easy for any such body of men to pass with composure through the ordeal of insults and abuse to which the testimony of trustworthy eye-witnesses compels me to believe they are habitually subjected in the more disturbed districts of Ireland.  As to the immediate outlook here, Mr. Cameron seems quite at his ease.  Even if ill-disposed persons should set about provoking a collision between “the victors and the vanquished of the Boyne” his arrangements are so made, he says, as to prevent the development of anything like the outbreaks of former years.

On the advice of Sir John Preston I shall take the Fleetwood route on my return to London to-night.

This secures one a comfortable night on board of a very good and well-equipped boat, from which you go ashore, he tells me, into an excellent station of the London and North-Western Railway at Fleetwood, on the mouth of the Wyre on the Lancashire coast.  Twenty years ago this was a small bathing resort called into existence chiefly by the enterprise of a local baronet whose name it bears.  Its present prosperity and prospective importance are another illustration of the vigour and vitality of the North of Ireland, which is connected through Fleetwood with the great manufacturing regions of middle and northern England, as it is through Larne with the heart of Scotland.

While it is as true now of the predominantly Catholic south of Ireland as it was when Sir Robert Peel made the remark forty years ago, that it stands “with its back to England and its face to the West,” this Protestant Ireland of the North faces both ways, drawing Canada and the United States to itself through Moville and Derry and Belfast, and holding fast at the same time upon the resources of Great Britain through Glasgow and Liverpool.  One of the best