The eastern side is better. A grand new Roman Catholic church has just been built at a cost of £25,000, and in front of the gilded railings--for they are gilt like the railings of Paris--were dreadful old women, like Macbethian witches, holding out their skinny hands for alms. Smartly dressed young ladies, daughters of publicans and shopkeepers, passed in jauntily, took a splash in the holy water, crossed themselves all over, knocked off a few prayers, and tripped merrily away. The better parts of the town belong to Mr. Smith-Barry, the knock-me-down cabins to Mr. Stafford O'Brien, whose system is different. As the leases fall in the former has modern houses built, while the latter is in the hands of the middlemen, who sub-let the houses, and leave things to slide. The _laissez-aller_ policy is very suitable to the genius of the genuine Irish, who may be said to rule the roost in Tipperary.
I interviewed all sorts and conditions of men, but every individual bound me down to closest secrecy. And although nobody said anything approaching high treason, their alarm on finding they had ventured to express to a stranger anything like their real opinion was very significant. The conversations took place last evening, and this morning before breakfast a young man called on me at the Station Hotel, Limerick Junction, three miles from Tipperary, "on urgent business." "Me father thinks he said too much, an' that ye moight put what he said in print, wid his name to it. Ye promised ye wouldn't, an' me father has confidence, but he wishes to remoind ye that there's plinty in Tipperary would curse him for spakin' wid an Englishman, an' that dozens of thim would murther him or you for the price of a pot of porter." Another messenger shortly arrived, bearing a letter in which the writer said that any mention of his name would simply ruin him, and that he might leave the country at once. And yet these men had only said what Englishmen would account as nothing.
New Tipperary adjoins the old, to which it is on the whole superior. All the descriptions I have seen of the Land League buildings are untrue and unfair. Most of them were written by men who never saw the place, and who paraphrased and perpetuated the original error. It was described as a "mile or two from Tipperary," and the buildings were called "tumble-down shanties of wood, warped and decaying, already falling to pieces." The place adjoins and interlocks with the old town; it is not separated by more than the breadth of a street, is largely built of stone, and comprises a stone arcade, which alone cost many thousands. Some of the cottages are of wood, but they look well, are slated, and seem in good condition. The butter mart, a post and rail affair, with barbed wire decorations, is desolate enough, and nearly all the shops are shuttered. Enamel plates with Dillon Street and Emmett Street still attest the glory that has departed, but the plate bearing Parnell Street escaped my research. The William O'Brien Arcade is scattered to the winds, save and except the sturdy stone walls, which (_à la_ Macaulay's New-Zealander) I surveyed with satisfaction, sketching the ruins of the structure from a broken bench in Dillon Street.