you, and often expected one from you; but I was deep in the battle of life, and you will do anything for your friend except tell him how you are. Mrs. Callan from time to time tells me something of you, and I dare say, or swear, she does as much for me to you. The Nation will have kept you acquainted with my public operations, and as for private life, there is no country like the old country, and there are no friends like the old friends. You and Mrs. Callan and I have sometimes had a three-handed talk, the like of which I will enjoy no more this side the Styx.
"Do not dream of Canada, my friend; an oak of the forest will not bear transplanting. Even a shrub like myself does not take kindly all at once to the new climate and soil. I never for a moment regretted having left the Ireland where Judge Keogh and Archbishop Cullen predominate; but the slopes of Howth, the hills of Wicklow, and the friends of manhood are things not to be matched in this golden land.
"I have met your books here as common as any one's, thanks to Routledge's cheap series. But the reading public is but a little leaven in the whole mass. Perhaps what you would enjoy most here is the Irish farmhouse, with all the rude plenty of thirty years ago revived, as I have met it hundreds of times. But it would need the author of 'Traits and Stories' to describe the strange hybrid, an Australian-Irish farmer with the keenness and vigour of a new country infused into his body. I am just returned from my election where they fought for me like lions in the name of the poor old country; and, to do them justice, Protestants as well as Catholics. We have bigots here, but the love of country is a stronger passion than bigotry in the heart of the exile.
"I hope you have pleasant news from Canada. If the two girls would return from that frozen swamp, it would add a zest to your life. …"Goodbye, my dear Carleton, at either end of the earth I hope you will not entirely forget me. Many of the pleasantest recollections of my life have in the foreground an Irish peasant lifting a head like Slive Donard over his contemporaries. Always yours,
" C. G. D."
