Few houses, where such could by any possibility
be housed, are to be seen from the roadside. There are so very few
cottages and so very many gentlemen's houses that I am forced to believe
that the peasantry have almost entirely disappeared. Yet I know there
must be laborers somewhere to keep the place so beautiful,
Ballymena, always a bustling place, has spread itself from a thriving
little inland town into a large place of some 8,000 inhabitants.
Notwithstanding the depression in the linen trade, this town presents a
thriving, bustling appearance as it has always done. The number of
whiskey shops is something dreadful. The consumption of that article
must be steady and enormous to support them. There is squalor enough to
be seen in the small streets of this town, but that is in every town.
The public road from Ballymena to Grace Hill passes through the Galgorm
estate which passed from the hands of its last lord, through the
Encumbered Estates Court, into the hands of its present proprietor. On
this estate a most wonderful change has been effected, and in a short
space of time to effect so much. During the old _regime_, and the
good old times of absentee landlordism, squalor and misery crept up to
the castle gates.
