Warbeck got his greatest welcome in Cork. St. Finbarre's Cathedral is the most un-English of ecclesiastical buildings, its front resembling Bayeux or Rheims. It is a monument of the good feeling which has always existed between Ireland and France. The bells of St. Ann's inspired Father Prout's immortal doggerel (see page 285).

Cork has always been beloved of foreigners. Thackeray went into ecstasies over it. The author of "Lorna Doone" wrote a novel called "Shandon Bells," and Mr. Henry Ford erected a factory for his products here.

Near Cork is Queenstown, whose name a polite corporation changed from Cove, in honor of Queen Victoria's landing. Queenstown is now known officially as Cobh (see pages 282 and 284).

THE BLARNEY HOAX

Near Cork, too, is Blarney, notorious for two things, the gillaroo trout, "the red fellow," and a practical joke known as the Blarney Stone, the kissing of which entails the same embarrassment as one suffers through the vulgar devices in amusement parks, in which trapdoors open and you come a purler, and sudden gusts of wind dismay the wearers of skirts (see page 287 and Color Plate VI). In Youghal is buried that Countess of Desmond who, when she died, in 1604, was one hundred and forty years of age. The place of her commitment is notably haunted.

Moeroun Castle, on the Kerry Road, is the birthplace of Admiral Sir William Penn, the father of the founder of Pennsylvania. Gougane Barra is a place of the most dark and beautiful aspect. Steep mountains and a lake like black marble, and trembling silver rivers shining into the dark water.

The kingdom of Kerry is wild and beautiful. Here are the remains, such as they are, of the Druids. Here are the earliest Christian remains. It is a county of semitropical mosses, with some plants that are found nowhere else than in Portugal. It is the home of Irish classical learning, more Latin and Greek having been known in Kerry than in the rest of Ireland combined. Its people are grave and courteous and have pleasant voices. The wild swan is more abundant here

than elsewhere in Ireland, and here are the last of the wild red deer.

The English poet, William Wordsworth, writing about Killarney, says: "In point of scenery this is the finest portion of the British Isles," which is treason to his own lake country. The name Killarney means "Church of the sloe bushes." The lakes are three: the Upper or McCarthy Moore's Lake; the Middle or Torc Lake; the Lower is called in the Gaelic Lough Leane.

In the Gap of Dunloe, the brawling Loe River expands into little lakes of water remarkable for their blackness. The Golden MacGillicuddy's Reeks and the Purple Mountains stand around this district like sentinels (see pages 290, 291).

Many of the rocks in Lough Leane are called after the chieftain of the district, the O'Donoghue of the Glens. O'Donoghue's House was blown down during a storm, but his Table, Prison, Pigeon House, and Library still survive.

Near by are the ruins of Muckross Abbey, one of the finest Norman abbeys in Ireland, with a yew tree in its cloisters sixty feet in height. Near Killarney, on the Kenmare Road, is Ross Castle, in the vicinity of which Tennyson wrote part of "The Princess." Close by the castle is Innisfallen Island, on Lough Leane, "the gem of Killarney," says Macaulay, "not a reflex of heaven, but a bit of heaven itself." Its main charms are its holly groves and red-berried rowan trees. The sky in fair weather is blue as Mary's Cloak.

THE MAJESTIC SHANNON IS BEING
THROTTLED

In the Province of Connacht there is the river Shannon, the broad-bosomed, majestic Shannon, which is being dammed and trained now by the Siemens-Schückert Company to provide electricity for all Ireland. What a peasant in his cottage wants electric power for, I cannot say, and indeed I have not heard anyone ask for it. for it. What industries it is going to serve are unknown. But engineers of the country that produced Einstein, and politicians so mentally able as to be in power, their combined wisdom is of a profundity. .

I suppose the explanation is that there. is money in it. There is money, too, in

STEEL CTUR

A MEMBER OF THE GARDA SIOCHANA, OR CIVIC GUARD, IN CORK

A story is told about the proverbial pugnacity of the Irish. When asked from what race the Irish sprang, a stalwart son of Erin is alleged to have replied with a brightening eye, "We spring from no race; we spring at them.

In many parts of the Connemara coast, boys up to 12 years of age are sometimes dressed in red flannel petticoats in order to deceive the fairies, who are supposed by the peasantry to run away with male children if they get an opportunity, but will not touch little girls.

harnessing a great steeplechaser to a garbage cart when his racing days are over. There would be money, too, for the Greeks if they made their hallowed Parthenon into an open-air cinema. But in Athens I am assured I should be torn limb from limb were I to suggest it.

Limerick is the city of the Danes and Patrick Sarsfield and the landing place of supplies from Hamburg for the furtherance of the Shannon scheme. In Clare are lakes like jewels-small lakes abounding in trout, and perch, and sad bream, the voracious pike.

The names of the small hamlets have a great beauty. Labasheeda, the Bed of Silk; Clooneenagh, the Solitary Meadow; Inchicronan, the Island of the Lullaby; Tinarana, the House of Songs.

AMONG CONNEMARA'S PEAKS

Connemara raises in the distance the threatening spears of its mountainsspears of purple and black, like the picked and terrible troops of some dreaded army; but as you come nearer you find in the Joyce's Country an unsurpassable beauty of heather, a hospitality unbounded, great courtesy, comeliness of men and women.

The bare stretches where the Connaught grouse grows fat and impudent on blaeberries and rowan berries, and the little lakes where the red-billed moorhen bobs courteously through the water as you come near, have a kindliness in them that goes to your heart.

Galway, City of the Blakes and Lynches, is the drowsiest, most magical, most Irish, of towns. The peat smoke from the houses assails your nostrils with a necromancy, and the old ache comes in your soul; and, looking westward on the ocean, the ache is satisfied, for before you lie the three islands of Aran, in the conger-hunted, herring-wealthy sea.

V

I feel that in describing my country I am anything but a success. Your Dublin journalist could give me two stone and a ten lengths beating over a five-furlong sprint.

There is a story, told with great gusto by Sir Henry Robinson, of a poor old parish priest who, when listening to some

men describing the European capitals, broke in with: "Well, now, gentlemen, do you know: Athy is grand, and Thrim is thruly magnificent." The former local government expert finds an excruciating humor in this remark. But there is something in the dear, simple, old clergyman's struggle for his country that touches my heart.

But the Father need not have worried. No canal in Venice has the soft beauty of the Great Canal that runs from Lough Ree and Athlone to Dublin, Dublin, going through the Bog of Allen, snowy with canavaun or bog flowers, bearing on its bosom barges of dreams. And the blue Danube of the facile waltz must bow to Anna Liffey, as she comes through Lucan, Patrick Sarsfield's attainted earldom, toward the sea. The mountains of Dublin, Two-Rock and Three-Rock, the Scalp and Katy Gallagher, bring to my mind "the little hills that are about Jerusalem."

MONUMENTS THAT LEAVE THE HEART

COLD

Our monuments in Derry, in Belfast, in Dublin, leave the heart cold. The bronze statue of the worthy Ferguson, in Derry, is called locally "The Black Man," so little of romance has it for Derrymen.

In Dublin we have a monument to Nelson, and statues of O'Connell and Parnell. But O'Connell said that all the liberty in the world was not worth one drop of human blood. There is a statue in Bayonne, close to the cathedral, in memory of a tailor and a student who fell in the foundation of the Third Republic, and on it are the words, Morts pour la Liberté. Unconsciously, when I read them, I stood to, as though the Colors were passing.

As to Parnell, for all that is written of him, he was a penniless political adventurer to whom Ireland gave a career and a living, and who let down his country for some woman. Irishmen don't do that. As to Nelson, we welcome him. He had nothing to do with Ireland, but he was a hero.

In Belfast there is a memorial to Albert, that most virtuous of prince consorts; but, in God's name, what did he ever do for Ireland, or even against her,

that his Germanic memory should take up one inch of Irish soil!

IRELAND OF THE THATCHED COTTAGE

To me Ireland always is the thatched cottage on the mountain side, the thunder of the hunt as it goes for Fairyhouse River, the grave, soft Irish voices. There is even a terrible black beauty about the mountainy men as, mad with solitude and drink, they crash through a fair fighting.

Even in our fighting we are courteous. We are a warlike nation, but we respect personalities. That story of the returned immigrant who, seeing a certain turbulence in his native town, asked "whether this was a private fight or could anybody join in," is not as ridiculous as it

seems.

It is the remark of a gentleman.

That the English have done us much evil is a fact I doubt. The grave English wisdom of Sir Roger de Coverley, that "much might be said on both sides," is not inapplicable. We have done some shrewd infighting. But the superior assumption that "Paddy" is a funny fellow, and that his mouth is thick with Irish bulls is an insolence not to be borne.

A remark at which any Englishman will laugh is a phrase I heard from some one in regard to a roystering, gaming, heavy-drinking Irish gentleman who is dead: ""Tis this way, your Honor, himself wouldn't offend a child!" Well, who would? But our friend would go out of his way to preserve the holiness that childhood is. And that is chivalry. When a brown Hand closes on my hand, and the pen drops from my fingers, and the writing is over, if some countryman of mine says as kind a word, it will be sufficient epitaph.

VI

We spend our lives seeking to form. Ireland. Our poets come down from the mountain tops, crying: I have here a song that will make Ireland wake. Our young men gallop into the streets trying to found a commonwealth more noble than the dream of Plato. Our statesmen rise up with papers in their hands, saying: Here is the New Ireland we have wrought. Let it begin. The old men

look at us strangely, with a curious lack of enthusiasm, but they say nothing to hinder us, for they, too, have known. these dreams.

Life goes on. New dogs go out to challenge for the Waterloo Cup, each, we hope, fleeter than the winner of last year. New horses go gallantly across to Aintree, seeking to win the Grand National. More eternal than the snow of the Alps is the heather and gorse of Three Rock Mountain.

The note of the cuckoo, the droning of the bee, and another foot to the height of great larches is our only measure of time. And suddenly we know our heads. are white as bog-flowers. Light comes to us, and we see that we, who thought we were men making Ireland, are only children at her feet. We have been playing, with that play of childhood that is more serious than the enduring work of