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Baltimore is one of the great fishing stations of Ireland, and to it the population of Cape Clear comes for most necessaries of life. Along that coast many craft are familiar, but an odd name hangs about one set: the fishermen from near Dungarvan are always known as "the Turks". In 1631 Algerine pirates made a descent on the town of Baltimore, sacked it and carried a hundred of its folk into slavery: and it was a fisherman from Dungarvan who piloted the corsairs.

All this shore had fine natural advantages for smuggling which in old days were not neglected: and still, I am told, certain places could be named where cigars and wines of excellent quality can be had at surprisingly moderate price.

Kinsale is a greater haven, fit in old days to be the rival of Cork; and the town there speaks of prosperous merchant folk, with its quaint weather-slated houses, each having the little bow-window which eighteenth-century mariners would seem to have specially affected, and its very old-world bowling green.

Loveliest of all regions in Ireland, this country of Desmond has suffered worst of all. Elizabeth's soldiers attempted here, and nearly carried out, a complete extermination of the native race by the sword and by starvation. And when after centuries the folk had multiplied again and were, by universal testimony, gay even in their rags, the famine of 1847 fell upon them, and in the blackest horrors of that time Skibbereen and West Cork attained an awful notoriety. Nowhere else did such heaps of famished and plague-stricken dead defy all efforts even to bury them.

The shadow of those days has not yet entirely passed: but the stranger will see little of it, following the famous route which leads up the Lee valley to Macroom , and so past Inchigeela and Ballingarry, past Gouganebarra by Keimaneigh, through the mountains to Bantry and Glengariff. And here confession must be made. I have never seen these famous beauties. I have followed the Lee only to Inchigeela where it breaks into a score of channels between little islands covered with scrub oak and birch and hazel, a piece of river scenery whose like I never saw. And I have driven along the road from Macroom to Killarney, along the Sullane River to Ballyvourney, which tens of thousands know as "the metropolis of Irish-speaking Ireland". For, as it chances, Cork alone, of the more prosperous counties, has kept the Irish speech, and kept it in a form the least modified by modern simplifications. Irish is still to-day the language of well-to-do and well-educated men and women. My host at Ballyvourney had received his education in Paris, more than that, had been through all the Franco-Prussian war, and had seen more of the world than is given to most men; but for many years he has been back, a kind of king among his own people, and a real repository of the ancient scholarship and traditions of the Gael. At Ballingeary, a few miles from him, was founded the first of those "summer schools" where men and women, boys and girls, of all sorts and conditions, and from many corners of the world, unite for common study of the noble language which careless generations had nearly suffered to die out. That settlement is now one of the objects of interest on the coach road, and travellers, if not tourists, may well find it the most interesting of all.

Bantry is one of the great naval stations, one of the great recruiting grounds for the navy. I saw it, as it should be seen, from the sea. It, too, is associated with the memory of one of those failures which stud the course of Irish history like sinister beacons: for here Hoche with a fleet aimed to land in 1796, and here half of his fleet actually arrived, with no one to oppose them. Hoche was then at the pinnacle of his power and fame, an idealist of the early Republican movement, consumed with that real passion for spreading freedom which Napoleon was destined to replace by a very different conception. But Hoche and half of the ships were tempest-driven far out of their course, and it was Grouchy, the slow mover, the man of hesitations, who reached the goal, and, having reached it, failed to act. History hinges on odd chances. Humbert's achievements, two years later, with a mere handful of men, when England had an army in Ireland, put it beyond dispute that Grouchy, even with what he had, could have set on foot a movement that would have driven English power out of Ireland at least for a time: and Wellington himself has told how great a part in breaking down the power of France, from those conflicts in the Peninsula on to the climax of Waterloo, was borne by the unemancipated Catholic Irish peasants, who formed the very bone and sinew of the British line.

It may well be that all was for the best in the best possible of worlds: that it was best that Ireland, instead of freeing herself with the help of Republican France, should help greatly to deliver Europe from the menace of Imperial France--and hand it over to the tender mercies of the Holy Alliance. Yet it needs the faith of Voltaire's philosopher to believe that anything could have been worse for Ireland than the historic evolution which she was actually fated to undergo.

Beyond Bantry is Glengarriff, of which Thackeray wrote that "such a bay, were it lying upon English shores, would be a world's wonder". I have only seen it off the deck of a steamer, away in a smother of cloud; but everyone confirms Thackeray. Castletown Beare, farther west on the north shore of Bantry Bay, I have seen, and the Castle of Dunboy, where was the seat of the O'Sullivan Beare, lord of this region, from which after the rout at Kinsale he and his people fled in a body, marching north amid dreadful privations till they crossed the Shannon and ultimately reached some protection in Ulster. But O'Sullivan's fighting men were left in the Castle under their captain MacGeoghegan, who prolonged resistance to the point of desperation against Carew's artillery. Mortally wounded at last, he succumbed in an attempt to reach the magazine to blow all, assailants and defenders, sky high. It would have been better for the garrison had he succeeded, since Carew hanged every man of them. There is the ruin to-day, breached and battered, standing in a grove of ilex on a very beautiful promontory.

Irish memory keeps vividly the detail of such events, and you can find men in that district to tell you the whole as if it had happened yesterday. I heard it all, though at secondhand, on a sail from the Kenmare River to Bantry, one night when the sea was all fire, and the mackerel shoals dashing this way and that, made flashes like a Catherine wheel, and porpoises or dolphins following them left long trails of light on the surface with sudden sparkles wherever the great fish came up to roll. Out to sea was the recurring flash of the Bull Light, for which ships steer on their way from America; and though there was no moon I could still distinguish this huge island rock, and its neighbour the Cow. The Calf, where the light used to be, is lower, and lies close in by Dursey Island--in that year much talked of, for a party of police who had crossed to collect rents from the few islanders, were effectively marooned, as the boat they had chartered left them, and every other craft was suddenly spirited away.

I think, perhaps, that night was lovelier on the Kenmare River--under a sky ablaze with stars--than even the days of sun had been; but nothing else in Ireland is so perfect, to my fancy, as this long, narrow sea lough between the two mountainous peninsulas, and having inland of it the full vista of those higher mountains which encircle Killarney's lakes.

Had they done so, they might have learnt more than ever either of them came to realize about the greatest Irishman of their day--the greatest power that has ever come out of purely Celtic Ireland in modern times: for Iveragh, the peninsula over against Derreen, was the birthplace and the home of Daniel O'Connell; it gave the climate and the environment which determined him to what he was.

I am not going to write much--because no writing can do it justice--of Iveragh, which is bounded on the south by the Kenmare River, on the north by Dingle Bay, on the west by the Atlantic Ocean , and on the east by Magillicuddy's Reeks and the lakes of Killarney; which is set therefore in beauty and majesty and splendour and has interest and charm at every turn of every road. But I am going to write a little of Daniel O'Connell and his people, for it is stupid to go to Kerry, and know nothing of the greatest Kerryman that ever lived, only--first, a little practical geography.

The train will take you to Kenmare, where the railway company has a really comfortable hotel, in whose garden you will see the characteristic subtropical vegetation which can be produced in this climate--palms, yuccas, New Zealand flax with its sword-shaped fronds, bamboos, and the rest, "all standing naked in the open air" like the heathen goddesses in the Groves of Blarney. From Kenmare the beautifully engineered road, which was a joy to man and beast till heavy motor coaches began to destroy it, runs along the north shore of the sea lough and a few miles out crosses the Kerry Blackwater by the most picturesque bridge over the loveliest stream that anyone could ever hope to throw a fly in. A little farther along is Parknasilla, the big hotel which has been built at a point where the coast breaks up into a number of wooded islets, with bridges connecting them, and meandering walks--well, nothing could be prettier. Then you go along through Sneem, getting into opener, wilder country. As you approach West Cove, Staigue Fort is on your right, a great circular structure of dry masonry, more developed than the similar buildings in Aran, for it has chambers in the thickness of the wall and stairs leading to platforms for defence. From this monument of prehistoric times, whose date can be measured by thousands of years, look across to your left, where another stone building is in progress--a large hospital designed to benefit the poor folk of this district: the bounty of a lady belonging to one of the families who profited by confiscation and for too long drew absentee rents. What may be the success of the scheme cannot be foretold: but the beauty of her desire to make restitution is not the least among the beauties of the Kenmare River.

At West Cove I have been lucky enough to stay with the man who knows the west of Ireland in its present life and its past history better perhaps than any living soul. In the great plot where cars draw up outside his door, great plants of Arum lilies shoot up and flourish, blooming luxuriantly in spring. They say that in Valentia an improving gardener thought them too profuse in the Knight of Kerry's garden, and pitched the roots out over the cliffs; but some caught on ledges, fastened there, and sent up white lilies in niches of the crags--so kind is that soft air.

Two or three miles beyond West Cove is the village of Caherdaniel and under it comes in Darrynane Bay, on whose shore is a little hotel, simple enough, but friendly; lying among Irish fisher folk who gather of a summer evening to dance on the crisp turf that covers the sand. Beside it is a small wood, and in the wood is Darrynane, a place of pilgrimage, for here O'Connell lived and here his descendants remain. The case of the O'Connells was typical. Driven by Cromwell out of the fertile lands of Limerick they took root among the mountains of Kerry and of Clare. The builder of Darrynane--that is of the original habitation--was a Daniel or Donal who married a daughter of the O'Donoghues--another great Kerry clan. This lady--M?ire Dubh--was a fruitful mother of children--she bore twenty-two of them and brought twelve to full age; but she was also notable as a poetess in the Irish tongue. Her second son, Maurice, inherited Darrynane, and was known all over the country as Hunting Cap O'Connell, for a tax was put on beaver hats, and from that day he wore nothing but the velvet cap in which he was used to hunt hare and fox on the mountains of Iveragh. Daniel O'Connell, his nephew, was a great votary of that sport, and I have talked with a man who had hunted in his company. And still in autumn you may see the harriers out on these hills and a namesake and descendant of his hallooing them on.

However, this is no place to talk of the great orator's career or his triumphs. To his own folk in Kerry he was always "the Counsellor", the wonderful advocate whose genius was like a flaming sword drawn for the terrified prisoner. No other Irish leader has ever been so near akin to the common folk; it was not for nothing he suckled the breast of a Kerry peasant, and learnt to speak his first words in the Irish tongue. Yet, oddly enough and pathetically enough, so little of a "nationalist" in our modern sense was he, that he welcomed and encouraged the growing disuse of Irish speech; all diversity of tongues seemed hateful to him, in his eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism. But no man was ever more in love with Ireland, or more devoted to one spot of earth than he to his Darrynane. He wrote to Walter Savage Landor of himself that he "was born within the sound of the everlasting wave", and that his "dreamy boyhood fed its fancies upon the ancient and long-faded glories of that land which preserved Christianity when the rest of now civilized Europe was shrouded in the darkness of godless ignorance".

"Perhaps," he went on, "if I could show you the calm and exquisite beauty of these capacious bays and mountain promontories, softened in the pale moonlight which shines this lovely evening, till all which during the day was grand and terrific has become serene in the silent tranquillity of the clear night--perhaps you would readily admit that the man who has so often been called a ferocious demagogue is in truth a gentle lover of nature, an enthusiast of all her beauties 'fond of each gentle and each dreary scene', and catching from the loveliness as well as from the dreariness of the ocean and the Alpine scenes with which it is surrounded, a greater ardour to procure the good of man in his overwhelming admiration of the mighty works of God."

That was how O'Connell thought of Kerry; and as you drive on from Caherdaniel along the high pass of Coomakista, which brings you out across a shoulder of mountain from the view across Kenmare River to a wider outlook full west on the Atlantic--why, you will have some inkling of the sublimity which he felt.

Below you is the little harbour to and from which the O'Connells worked their smuggling craft; and you can discern a narrow cleft in the rocks making a short cut for row boats on a calm day. Once, they say, a sloop of the smugglers lay in the harbour and was suddenly aware of a revenue brig rounding the headland from the south. The wind blew into the harbour. It was impossible to escape, and the sloop lay motionless and to all appearance idle. But just as the pursuer tacked and ran straight into the harbour mouth a sail was hoisted on the sloop, she began to move, and in a minute her sides were scraping through the tiny passage, while men with sweeps out fended her off this and that sunken rock; and in another minute she was out and away, cracking on full sail with a good half-hour's lead before the revenue boat could beat out of the narrow sound to chase her.

From Coomakista the road descends steeply to Waterville, a famous place for anglers, where a new town has grown up about the outlet to Lough Currane, for here is now the chief station of the transatlantic cables. The first of these cables was laid from Valentia Island some ten miles farther north opposite the town of Cahirciveen, which will be your destination if you purpose to return by rail along the shore of Dingle Bay. But I commend to all, motorist, cyclist, or foot traveller , another way of exploring Iveragh. Also, if the sea is not your enemy, it is worth while to stay in Waterville--where the sea as well as the lake offer great chance to fishers--and try an expedition to the Skellig Rocks. Fine weather is needed, for there is difficulty in landing on these astonishing places where the gannets are the chief habitants: strong flyers, they nest nowhere between this point and the Bass Rock in Scotland, yet you may see them by dozens anywhere along the west coast even in the breeding season. On the Skelligs are old stone stairs of tremendous height, the work of old-time anchorite monks who established themselves here in stone beehive-shaped cells--still intact, for you to wonder at the discomforts of piety. And in the crevices of these rocks rare birds breed--the stormy petrel, the Manx shearwater, along with legions of puffin, guillemot, razorbill, shag, and the rest. But do not go there even with a light easterly wind, for it blows direct on to the rocky landing place; and if it blows at all from the south-west the swell may be too big even on the sheltered side. Nature is on a big scale, a rough playfellow, out here in the Atlantic.

Even landward from Lough Currane, it is a wild nature that you must encounter on the old mountain road to Killarney, which you should travel for choice.

A few miles down brings you into the valley of the Caragh river which flows out from Loughs Reagh and Cloon and after a course of some ten miles enters the long and deep Caragh Lake, whence another short run brings it to the sea. This is the valley which lies west of the Reeks, and, for my own part, I count this aspect of them finer than anything you will see at Killarney. There is a big, new hotel at the outfall of Caragh Lake on the railway, much frequented now: but all my time among these hills and waters has been given to a little oldfashioned anglers' inn, the Glencar hotel, on the reach of river between Bealalaw bridge and Lickeen rapids. Here you may fish for salmon at a nominal charge in one of the best waters in Ireland: on the evening when I got there this summer, they were jumping everywhere in the beautiful Long Range pool where the little Caragh joins the main stream; red, ugly fish, it must be owned, for this was in September and they had lain there since June without a fresh to move them--but still there were salmon and plenty of them. Or you can fish free of charge at Lough Acoose at the headwaters of Caraghbeg, in under the flank of Carrantuohil, with better prospect of a full basket than anywhere else known to me. The trout are not big anywhere in Kerry, but in Acoose they run to a good herring size, and the man who fished it the day when I was at Glencar got something over two dozen--a usual bag. My companion and I had gone farther afield, to the headwaters of Caragh itself, right up into the great ring of mountains through which the pass of Bealachbeama lets you out to the Kenmare side. Little need be said about our fishing, which was interrupted by the fact that our boat, leaking like a sieve, finally foundered while we were trying to get her ashore--a new boat too, wanting nothing but a couple of good coats of paint. Yet the chance which drove us off Cloon, while the boat was being got ashore and emptied, sent us up across a mile of bog to fish the upper lake from the shore; and what a lake! lying right in under the steep side of a mountain almost precipitous, where the eagles built till a year or two back, and for three parts of its circumference ringed about like the crater of a volcano.

It was a day of dry wind, northerly to north-easterly, and of hard lights: one lacked the magical enchantment of westerly air over the whole: yet for sheer grandeur I do not know that all my wanderings after fish in Ireland have ever taken me to so fine a scene.

That little hotel, primitive in its equipment but most friendly, has its attractions to offer all the year round, for the salmon fishing begins in earnest in February, and through the winter months there is rough shooting , to be had over the great expanses of heather and those broad belts of native wooding which grow about the river in its lower course. From the hotel down to the lake your path lies between this scrub of oak and holly and birch and a water, swift yet deep, where pool succeeds pool, each divided from the next only by strong rapids. You have no monopoly there: the river is fished from both banks and can be covered right across, though it needs a good man to do it; but it is practically a free fishing and the best free river fishing that I know in Ireland--absolutely an ideal spot for the holiday-maker who does not insist on being near the sea. You can walk from it all the finest mountains in Kerry since it lies in the very centre: and away west of you is Glenbeigh, another valley where decent quarters can be had amid landscape of the same type. Of the same type--but I cannot believe that anywhere in Kerry or out of it you will match the journey which convoyed me from Glencar to my next stage at the Caragh Lake hotel. It was inland scenery no doubt, but the breath and the feeling of the sea is over all this neck of sea-washed Iveragh, and that river valley seemed no more than an avenue through the hills leading to the gateway of ocean. We walked along the river bank, often shoulder high in fern, often stopping to pull the blackberry clusters, and we studied the pools set in, here among trees, there with open sward on both sides and moor stretching away behind. Below the rapids we took boat, and for a mile or more rowed through level bogland, with groups of Scotch fir, purple stemmed in the afternoon light, rising from the river bank. Between their trunks, or in the open gaps, we could see the peaked mass of Carrantuohil, rising in the south-east, the light on its high ridges, but the valleys and chasms on its sides deep in shadow. As we neared the lake the flat land broadened, and from across it came the aromatic, pungent smell of bog myrtle, distinct as the scent from a beanfield, but strong and tonic as brine. Then for an hour and half we paddled down the lake between mountain and mountain, winding round promontory after promontory into sight of reach after reach of the lake. Finally as we entered the wide northern stretch--for our course was due north--all the shore was seen divided into demesnes, big and little, each with its own wooding. The hotel lies farthest of all towards the river's outflow in the north-west, and whoever chose that site deserves credit, for across the wide shining water rise the whole ring of mountains--Carrantuohil away to the south-east, and all the other heights that close in the valley behind Cloon Lake and Bealachbeama spreading fan-wise across the horizon as you look out from the pleasant terrace where palm and hydrangea grow. It is not so finished, not so exquisite, as Killarney; but I should rather choose it for a holiday. I sat on the terrace for an hour that Sunday and watched the sunlight fade off Carrantuohil: all was green and olive when we sat down, for it was a coldish evening and the air northerly; but cloud lay on the peaks, or rather caught the peaks intermittently as it drifted in wreaths across, so that at no time was the whole mountain visible. But gradually as the sun sank these wreaths became touched with a rosy glow, and below them what had been olive-green took on deep tints of coppery purple, rich and glowing, the purple gaining as the rose deepened on the cloud wreath; and higher and higher the shaft of light struck, reaching now only the very topmost pinnacles, till finally it faded out, and all lay before as in a sombre stillness waiting for the fall of night.

Nothing that I carry away from Killarney haunts me with the same fullness of beauty, but perhaps only because Killarney is no one's discovery; it has no secret lover. You might as well seek to praise Sarah Bernhardt's genius or Tennyson's charm of style. Yet I suppose each one will discern for himself some passing perfection, some special facet of that loveliness--as I indeed remember the wonderful, shadowed, lucid green of water reflecting darkly the bank of tall reeds which grow westward of the landing stage to which we rowed in after fishing: and remember, too, the singular sight of a man's naked body, as he stood poised before plunging in to bathe, some hundred yards from us; for the low sun caught his figure, outlined against the long line of dark foliage behind him, and made it at once the glowing centre of a beautiful landscape.

This was on the lower lake, largest by far of the three which form a crescent, compassing from south to north the eastern flank of the Reeks.

My last visit found me at the Victoria Hotel where the lake is broad and open to the Purple Mountain, a noble landscape: but to reach what is my idea of Killarney proper, you must row across to the narrows between the lovely isle of Inisfallen and the east shore, so reaching Ross Bay and a more confined water, studded over with island rocks. Here the shores are of that peculiar limestone which the lapping of water frets into numberless quaint crannies and fissures till the verge of the water looks as though it were a frame intricately carved by some patient craftsman; and in all these chinks and crevices ferns and other wild and beautiful herbage grow with exquisite profusion. That is what makes to my mind the essence of Killarney's charm, this wealth of intricate detail making a foreground to mountain and lake scenery as bold and wild as any highlands can show. Add to this the presence of unfamiliar foliage, here native, exotic everywhere else--notably the arbutus with its dark, glossy leaf and ruddy stem, handsomest of all shrubs; dark yew also, and juniper, mingled in with native growth of oak and birch, yet through all, skilful plantation has set in this and that graceful foreign tree, this and that bright berry. It is no wonder that such a place should have become one of the world's great tourist centres, especially when to these beauties are added the distinction and interest of fine ruins--Ross Castle where the O'Donoghues were lords till Cromwell's forces drove them out; Inisfallen where St. Finian's pious monks had their abbey through untroubled centuries. And, being as it is, Killarney is equipped for the tourist as is no other place in Ireland: all the excursions have been thought and planned, and your hotelkeeper will have arrangements fully made; nor is the plague of beggars at all the annoyance that it used to be--a blessed reform. The boatmen have learnt their trade of cicerone to perfection, and will not only tell you the standard yarns and jests and legends of the place if you desire them, but will have the tact to discriminate serious-minded folk--such as anglers--who may probably not want this form of entertainment.

Yet, for all that, it is a place for tourists, and, as such, commands only my reluctant tribute. But the drive from Killarney to Kenmare which, skirting Muckross and the upper lake, carries you gradually circling round the whole crescent till you rise into the Black Valley where the Gap of Dunloe breaks in--well, that drive, I must say, fairly broke down my coldness: I grew no less enthusiastic than the famous Scottish expert on salmon fishing who was of the party and declared the whole thing equal to the Trossachs--from which I gather that Scotland at least has not anything to show more fair. Moreover, fishing on the lakes is free and good; there is a chance of salmon, and trout are both plenty and sizeable. That is to say, on a good day they should average close on half a pound, and this means that a pound fish is no great rarity--as he certainly would be in Glencar. Also in Killarney town you have the best fly tier in Ireland; many a friend of mine in Donegal who never saw Kerry could swear to Mr. Courtney's work in this delicate craft, almost an art in itself.

But that is all I have to say about "Heaven's reflex, Killarney".

My last visit to Kerry was on a commission of enquiry into fisheries which took us driving round in motors to places off the usual track; and a railway strike came in, to complete our survey of West Munster. We had come up from Waterville, along the backbone of the peninsula, crossing Bealach Oisin, so that the coast road by Dingle Bay is known to me now only by far-off memory of a forty-miles drive in a long car--which the railway has for many years superseded. But I revived my memory of a bit of it, coming up in the morning from Caragh Lake to Killorglin, where we held our court, at the outfall of the Lowne which drains the lakes of Killarney. Opposite us across the bay was that other mountainous region of Corcaguiney, the Dingle Peninsula, which differs from Iveragh in this, that from the high point of the Reeks Iveragh slopes westward by a gradual declension of peaks and ridges; whereas Corcaguiney rises continuously westward and seaward till it reaches its climax in Brandon Hill rising majestically from the very limit of the land. So rises Mweelrea at the mouth of Killery, and I imagine that on a clear day from Brandon's top you would see Mweelrea, and from Mweelrea again might distinguish the peak of Errigal far north in Donegal. At all events I knew an old gentleman who told me that he had seen the whole length of Ireland in one field of vision, and he took either Mweelrea or Croagh Patrick as his midland centre and Errigal or Brandon as his two extremes.

This Dingle Peninsula is explored by very few, unexplored by me, alas! I could see from the road the dark outline of Cahirconree, a wonderful stone fort, built two thousand feet up on the side of the Sliabh Mish mountains: and away out to the west the Blasket Islands were in sight, hardly more accessible than the Skelligs, but inhabited by a race of Irish-speaking fisher folk, among whom a Norse student of the Celtic languages settled himself the other day and was overjoyed to find a stone inscription in Runic characters, containing the mind of some Scandinavian forebear of his own, set down in the Norse that was spoken a thousand years ago and had waited ten centuries for him to decipher it.

To escape from all this record of civilized barbarity, the mind gladly turns back to far older and by far less barbarous days. Brandon keeps the name of the most picturesque figure in the long roll of Irish saints--St. Brendan, the Navigator, who was born a little west of Tralee, at Barra, close to the promontory of Fenit, in or about the year 484. He was baptized by a bishop named Erc, whose name still lingers in Termon Eirc, a townland three miles north of Ardfert: and a well near Ardfert which keeps St. Brendan's name is still a place of pilgrimage and votive offering, more specially on the saint's own day. Under Erc's guidance the lad was brought up, though he got some of his schooling at Killeady, the convent where St. Ita had established her religious house near Newcastle West in county Limerick. Later, Erc sent him to travel that he might "see the lives of some of the holy fathers in Erin"; and he went north to Connacht where the school of St. Jarlath at Tuam was already famous . He went farther north still in Connacht, and is said to have established a settlement of Kerrymen in the plains near Castlebar; but he returned to Kerry to get his priestly orders from the hands of his tutor Erc, now nearing death.

"Saw it in all its varying moods--but above all, at even, when the setting sun went to his caverns below the sea, and the line of light along the glowing west seemed a road to the Fortunate Islands where the sorrows of earth never enter, and peace and beauty for ever dwell. It was a dim tradition of man's lost paradise, floating down the stream of time, for with curious unanimity the poets and sages both of Greece and Rome spoke of these Islands of the Blessed as located somewhere in the Western Ocean. The same idea from the earliest times has taken strong hold of the Celtic imagination, and reveals itself in many strange tales, which were extremely popular, especially with the peasantry on the western coast. To this day the existence of Hi Brasail, an enchanted land of joy and beauty, is very confidently believed by our western fishermen. It is seen from Aran once every seven years, as Brendan saw it in olden times, like a fairy city on the far horizon's verge."

According to the records, Brendan was not first on this quest. Barinthus, a neighbouring monk, had fared seaward in search of a truant brother and had found him in the island called "Delicious", from which they sailed yet farther west and found other wonders. But at all events, however moved, Brendan bade his monks to fast with him forty days, then choosing fourteen of them, he built a great curragh, with ribs and frame of willow, hide-covered, and so with forty days of provisions they set out upon the trackless sea, steering for the "summer solstice".

Seven years that voyage lasted: they reached island after island in the Atlantic main, "following God's guidance, fed by his Providence, and protected by his power". At length, it is said, they reached the continent of America and found the place where they landed "to be indeed a delicious country abounding in everything to gratify the palate and please the eye"; and they were about to push across the swift, silvery current that had borne them to the verge of this land, when an angel rose before their path and bid them turn homeward, instead of resting to enjoy. And so back to Ireland came Brendan the Navigator, the travelled Ulysses among Irish saints.

What lies behind all this, who knows exactly? but certainly those dwellers on the outermost verge of Europe always had vague yet glorious rumours of a land beyond the sea--a land in truth whose flotsam and jetsam, strange nuts and weeds, the ocean current casts from time to time on their shores. And heaven knows, that this Western people, since Columbus brought promise into fulfilment and imagining into sure knowledge, have found in the west there a haven, a refuge from the miseries into which they were born. America has been a strange and often a sinister realization of the Fortunate Islands--yet conceive of Ireland's history for the past century without America to lean on, to look to for help. Its streets have not been paved with gold, no easily-won sustenance has been there: yet to the fisher folk and farmers it has offered the fulfilment of desire, the enlargement of aspiration; and the course that St. Brendan first charted, though it is more frequented now than could be wished, though it leads often enough to unhappy wreckage, has yet been to Ireland a blessed road.

No man who visits this Atlantic seaboard of Ireland but must feel something of what Archbishop Healy's eloquence hints at--the sense of an open gateway beyond the sun-track through which imagination is beckoned towards its own goal. There is a soothing and restful influence from those vast spaces of the west. And even landward it follows you. We crossed the neck of the Dingle Peninsula to the pretty and prosperous town of Tralee, and all eastern Kerry merging into Limerick stretched away to right of us, a wide rolling expanse of land well divided into fields for tillage. Our course lay still on north-east to Listowel, crossing the tract of land which divides Tralee Bay from the Shannon's broad estuary; all about us, the country was spacious, yet well inhabited, set thick with trim little farmhouses: there was much traffic on the roads, of horse and man--and of asses: I saw there what is not common, two donkeys driven abreast in a little cart, stepping very smart down a long hill. There was plenty of room for the people, yet the people were there--on the land, living by the land, with the large air of the Atlantic blowing in across them. Next day, since the trains were not running, we had to proceed by motor to Limerick, and we simply ran north to the Shannon shore at Tarbert and followed the river to Limerick for a matter of forty miles, stretch by stretch, a broad sea lane for vessels, but alas! no vessels there: hardly a sail on the waters; though battleships can lie at Foynes, thirty miles in from Loop Head.

There is much to pause over on that route: Glin, where the hereditary Knights of Glin, an offshoot of the Desmond Geraldines, have maintained themselves, for a matter of seven centuries, even through the "pacifications" of Elizabeth's reign: Askeaton, many miles farther on, a chief seat of the main Desmond line, and in Ireland--so rich in ruins, so poor in buildings that have escaped destruction--there are few finer ruins than the Desmond Castle here, and the Franciscan Abbey. Still nearer Limerick, at Carrigagunnel, you see the landmark of another power, for this castle was built by the O'Briens of Thomond and it stood over against Bunratty on the Clare bank, another great fortress.--Yet a mere catalogue is without interest, and here is no space to trace the interlocking fortunes and conflicts of Norman noble, Irish chief, and Cromwellian soldier.

Let me concentrate on one spot, one group of memories. Above the little town of Foynes is a small house on a hill, now beautifully surrounded by plantations of shrubs and flowers; it was the home of a lady known to the Irish people at home and abroad, for her work in improving the lot of steerage passengers on emigrant ships, and also for her writings in prose and verse; yet known better as the true child of a notable father, William Smith O'Brien, Protestant, landlord, aristocrat, rebel, and felon by the law. She was one who felt and loved the beauty of Ireland--not only what one may call the scenic beauty of such places as Killarney, but the essential spacious beauty of those fertile valleys, those wide skies.

"Men come and go by this great river," she wrote, "and the revelation of its beauty is not made to them fully, often not at all; but let one live by it and it is the most beautiful place in the whole world.... But to-night it was no hidden beauty. I went down by the river in the evening. It was full, the tide just past the turn, and sweeping down the great mass of water at an extraordinary pace, and yet, though the whole river was swinging along at many miles an hour, the surface was a marvellous mirror. The glowing masses of furze on the island, a quarter-mile away, were so near and distinct in the wave, one could almost stretch out a hand to gather them. Every cloud and every shade of light and colour in the sky was again in the river, but far more intense. At my feet and twenty yards down and across the channel was a dense black cloud reflected, its crenellated edge cut sharp against the reflection of silver, blue, grey, and intense white light stretching far away westward. I stood, as the old books used to say, 'entranced', and still the river swept down, and still the furze and the wonderful green and the dark cloud-bar were, as it were, under my hand, and the glorious 'gates of the Shannon', as the Elizabethans called this Foynes, were opened to heaven's light beyond my touch."

From the road just beyond Foynes towards Limerick, you shall see a round hill topped by a ruin and the tokens of a graveyard. There in the high windy burial-place of her choice she lies, this lover of Ireland and of the Shannon, Charlotte Grace O'Brien. And for the last word in this little book, I, her near kinsman, whose main ties are with other provinces, shall set down another passage of her writings, which is curiously revealing of Munster. For behind Knockpatrick you may see a few miles farther off another low hill which is topped by a well-marked mound, and on the mound a great mass of shattered masonry stands, "like a black clenched fist thrust against the western heavens". That is Shanid, the original stronghold of the southern Geraldines: "Shanid aboo", was their war-cry.

To this place Charlotte O'Brien, who loved flowers hardly less even than other live things, came to look for a reported rare plant--"The Virgin Mary's Thistle", "so-called because the leaves are all blotched and marbled with white stains, and legend made it a sacred plant bearing for ever stains of the Blessed Virgin's milk".

"Sure enough," she wrote, "I found a mass of it growing together only on the southern exposure under the great wall. Now this plant is said to exist only as an introduced species in the British Isles. To account for it, therefore, on this utterly lonely and desolate hilltop, we must look back through the centuries and see the sacred plant in the monastery garden at Askeaton--the first Geraldine home in Desmond. We must think how the seed may--in fact, must--have been carried up to this watch tower, perhaps by some long-haired daughter of the Geraldines, sent for safety to the mountain fortress. We must imagine how its frail growth took hold on the sheltered side; we must see generation after generation of men swept away, the monastery torn down and desecrated, the name of Desmond almost forgotten, the great Geraldine race broken and destroyed: we must see the almost impregnable castle blown to pieces and left as a trampling ground for summer-heated cattle; more wonderful than all, we must realize that time has so gone, that no record is left us of that great downfall and destruction--nothing--nothing but a few pieces of nine-foot-thick wall, a few earth mounds, and the sacred plant. Irishmen! What national history lies in one seed of that plant!"

True enough! And true it is that to feel the real beauty of Ireland, her mountains and valleys, her fields and waters, you must see them in the light of the past as well as the present, informed by knowledge and by love.

Transcriber's Notes

Page 24: Changed Roscarberry to Roscarbery.

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