Just as the sight of an abbe gave M.Homais, in "Madame Bovary," an unpleasant whiff of the winding-sheet, there is something in the whole appearance of Mr.Carson that conveys to me the dank smell of the prison, and the suffocating sense of the scaffold.

Do you remember that strange, terrible day in the "Derniere Incarnation de Vautrin," in which Balzac describes Vautrin's passage through the ranks of the gaol-birds and gaol officials among whom he had passed so much of his life?
Above all, do you recall that final, and supreme, and awful touch in which, addressing consciously the handler of the guillotine, he professes to take him for the chaplain, and, bringing the poor executioner for once to confusion, is addressed with blushing face and trembling lips with the observation, "Non, Monsieur, j'ai d'autres fonctions"?
[Sidenote: Green Street Court-House.] Mr.Carson, doubtless, has "autres fonctions" than that of Jack Ketch--who has always been so efficient and constant an instrument of Government in Ireland--but I am never able to regard one part of the official machinery by which wronged nations are held down as very different from the other.

Above all, I am unable to make much distinction between the final agent in the gaol and those other actors who play with loaded dice the bloody game in the criminal court with the partisan judge and the packed jury.

Doubtless, happy reader, you have never been in a place called Green Street Court-House, in Dublin.

If you ever go to the Irish capital, pay that spot a visit.