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 writer's own hand. "Et ego in Arctis" has been written beneath one sketch, where we see a narrow lidless coffin in which rests the perfect skeleton of a man, some whaler who had perished here, according to the inscription marked on a rude wooden cross in the Dutch tongue, just a century before. Another shows us the snow-crested peaks of Jan Mayen, peeping strangely through one diminutive window cut in a dense wall of cloud, at the tiny Foam who has come so far to pay her morning call on this giant of the North, and who now stands curtseying gracefully outside the inhospitably-closed doors of her ill-mannered friend. A large painting in oils has been done from this little sketch, which, having crossed more southerly seas, in company with the portraits of the more renowned of the Sheridan family, to adorn the walls of Lord Dufferin's then home, the Embassy of Constantinople, has now returned to the walls of Clandeboye, where likewise is to be seen the figure-head of the gallant little Foam, which has made her way so far afield.

The rush and fall of salt water has ever since his first voyage had a charm for Lord Dufferin, and he has rarely failed to snatch some hours from each of the busy years of his life for a tussle with the sea.

A distinguished sea captain was recently heard to remark that His Excellency was "again trying to make a hole in the list of Ambassadors by tempting Neptune with that water-sprite of his, which has the outward characteristics of a boat and the inward mechanism of a watch." The allusion was made to a graceful little fairy of diminutive dimensions, the Lady Hermione, of which we give a representation in our initial letter, and which, succeeding The Woman in White, The Man in Black, and a host of other craft owning Lord Dufferin as captain, is now disporting herself in the Bay of Naples, but which we may shortly expect to see nearer home, in one of those many harbours which own the sway of the lately-created Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.

Lord Dufferin is himself a good sportsman; he has shot deer in Russia, bear in the Rocky Mountains, and tiger in India, besides clay-pigeons on the Bosphorus. At his present post in Rome, being Irish, he spends his hours of recreation in the hunting field, where Jaracewski, "The Hunting Colonel," who is not unknown in the English shires, points out his manner of taking his fences to the young Roman officers who are being trained in le sport, and bids them do likewise. Copies of a popular illustrated paper, representing His Excellency on horseback poised in the air above a five-barred gate, and instantaneous photographs of him under similar condi-