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But with its sparkle tarnished by the racial and religious feuds of ages fed by that bigotry of ProtestantJ and R o m a n Catholic alike, which, to quote a great Protestant Irishman (Lord Plunkett) " is inaccessible to reason and irreclaimable by experience," the consequence being generations of misgovernment and injustice. T h e gem, however, m a y recover its pristine lustre, not by crude and hastily compounded political nostrums, but by a well-considered, equitably-devised system of genuine H o m e Rule, preserving the Imperial connection, rigidly protecting or compensating vested rights, and framed in the interests of all classes—a legislative guarantee for the welfare of the country North and South; Charta—to be used as a lever wherewith to raise not a mere Local Government Act, but a Magna Ireland to a position to which she would be in every way equal, when the inevitable finale would be " peace and prosperity." I was not long a Port Phillipian ere I was affected by a penchant for dabbling in newspaper writing, and, as a singular matter of fact, m y first contribution was a letter to the Herald in 1844, signed "Garryowen," and this was thefirsttime the word saw itself in print in the colony. At the Grand Separation Festivity, thefirstfancy ball in the colony, in 1850, in concert with a dear, but n o w dead, Colleen Bawn, I assumed the character of " Garryowen." O n several occasions since I adopted other sobriquets in journalistic amusements, but there was a time-hallowed charm surrounding the Limerick word that I was unable to dispel, and consequently a few years ago I m a d e up m y mind that when anonymously writing it should be m y future literary trade-mark. I have kept m y word, and it would be a singular repetition of History were the term to become so interwoven with the traditions and babyhood of the Premier City of the Southern Cross, as to be quoted by future generations, when the writer as an individual and an " Old Colonist" shall be utterly forgotten.