hamlet a steep road runs back climbing the skirts of the Devil's Mother—where eagles build—and then plunges down the pass which leads to Maam at the upper end of Lough Corrib, and so to the isthmus of Cong, under which water makes a subterranean pathway for the eels of Lough Mask into Corrib, whence they go by the weir at Galway (where eel traps take toll of them) to their spawning grounds in the deepest sea.

This road is one of the boundaries about the region of the Twelve Pins, through which wild sanctuary no made track for wheels has been driven. You have the Pins (or "Bens" rather) on the south as you go from Leenane to Maam; on the west as you go from Maam to Maam Cross; on the north from Maam Cross to Recess, and on the east as you take the beautiful road from Recess by Lough Inagh, and so through the defile at Kylemore, where the great house stands with long terrace facing on to the exquisite lower lake, approached by a roadway along which are mile-long hedges of crimson fuchsia. Kylemore means the Big Wood, and the name is natural enough, for here only in Connemara is there any considerable growth of trees; the country is too bare and wild for them. At Carna, on the shore of Galway Bay, can be seen the lamentable remains of an experimental plantation, replaced now by a new and much more successful planting of the New Zealand flax, which with its yucca-like fronds grows very freely on the west, and gives some hope of a new industry.

But beyond Maam, on the shores of Corrib, is wooding and to spare; none denser, more undisturbed. About Cong are the famous woodcock covers where Lord Ardilaun's guests have killed five hundred birds in a day. Almost every island on the lake (and there is said to be an island for every day in the year) is set thick with leafage, and there are those who claim that Corrib where it broadens out between Cong and Oughterard is a rival to Killarney. I do not seek to decide such a contention; but the place is far richer in antiquarian interest than Killarney, and infinitely less tourist-ridden.

A FISHERMAN'S HOME UNDER DIAMOND MOUNTAIN, BALLYNAKILL BAY

It is no business of mine here to write about hotels; but still one wishes to show what is practicable for those who may care to explore this great line of western lakes. By far the easiest way to go is by the little steamer from Galway to Cong—a run of some thirty miles, done very leisurely. There is a comfortable inn at Cong: a larger one three or four miles off at Clonbur; at Ballinrobe, I suppose, quarters can be had, and certainly in Tourmakeady on the west shore of Mask. If, however, you have followed the line from Recess to Letterfrack, and so to Leenane, then there is an admirable possibility for varying the journey. Take the road from Leenane to Maam. Halfway down it, near Kilmilkin, another road turns off steeply to the left so that you still contrive to skirt the Devil's Mother; and after a mile or two through bog, it goes corkscrewing down a woeful hill, and you are in the basin of Lough na Fooey, high among the hills of Joyce Country. Beyond the lake the road climbs again to emerge from that basin, and you pelt away down the long slope of Maamtrasna, the valley at the head of upper Lough Mask. Savage memories dwell there; memories of killings between peasants in the land war of the 'eighties, memories of high diplomatic slaughter when the heir to the earldom of Ulster was done away with in Illaun an Iarla, a little island which your driver will show you. The Stauntons who carried out that killing kept a bad name from it through centuries of Irish tradition.

Striking in, then, behind Kilbreedy Mountain, which sunders upper Lough Mask from the main water, you soon come out on the shore of the lake, and I wish you the luck to see two as pretty girls as met me just where the counties join at the little Owenbrin river. A few miles of tolerable road will bring you to the prosperous-looking little village of Tourmakeady, where is a hotel. Here is fishing to be had for pike and for big trout, and here much that is pleasant and profitable can be studied. At the Franciscan monastery, a civil-spoken stranger will always find a welcome, and, at least while Brother Leo is still living, one of the best of talkers to instruct him in the history of all that countryside. These monks have largely helped on the work of the Congested Districts Board in teaching improved methods of farming, and the like: they have been what monastic centres were often in old days. Close by is another factor in the modern development of Ireland, the Connaught college for study of the Irish language, here where it is living on the lips of young and old. In summer you shall find from eighty to a hundred students working there, with classes held largely in the open air: but all centring about a farmhouse converted to these unforeseen uses. Most of the students will be school teachers, desirous to advance themselves in a subject for which there is a swiftly growing demand; but you will almost to a certainty find a sprinkling there who have come, it may be, from France, from Hungary, from the Western States of America, from heaven knows where, to pursue this long-neglected but now eagerly followed branch of learning. And you may hear, and perhaps see, how with the study pleasant festivities interweave themselves of an evening, dances, jigs, reels, hornpipes, and the rest—or simply the céilidhe, a gathering for talk and story-telling round the fire.

From Tourmakeady, I would have you proceed by boat, crossing the lake to Ballinrobe, and seeing on your way Caisleán na Caillidhe, Hag's Castle, a very early example of the fortifications which Irish chiefs began to build when they had learnt from the Normans how much stronger were stone walls than earthen ramparts. Yet here the stone wall is on the model of an earthen dun, built circular, and of no great height—an enclosure for defence rather than a dwelling place—doubly defended too, for it stands on an island near to the Ballinrobe shore.

As you drive from Ballinrobe to Cong, you shall see on your left a huge cairn of stones crowning a low height. This is an outlying monument of that famous battle of Moytura, fought, it is said, between the legendary Tuatha de Danann, warrior demigods, against those older inhabitants of Ireland, Firbolgs, men of the leathern wallet. Who fought that fight, when they fought it, is obscure, but fought it was, and the cairns rise thick over the battlefield, a couple of miles behind Cong. All this lore was studied out and set down by the notable father of a still more celebrated son. Oscar Wilde must have spent no small part of his boyhood at Moytura House where his father, Sir William Wilde, passed what holidays a great surgeon could secure, and where he wrote his Antiquities of Lough Corrib.

There is another legendary battlefield in Sligo called the northern Moytura, which tradition identifies with the site of a second and final battle in which the De Danann defeated the men of the wallet, and it is marked by the same profusion of cairns and stone circles—which, it must be allowed, can be constructed with less labour in the west of Ireland than elsewhere, because the whole surface of the ground is covered with the material for them. Yet assuredly some great event must be marked by monuments so laborious: though I find their associations a trifle too shadowy for interest.

The great cairn on the road to Ballinrobe is said to be that of King Eochy, the Firbolg leader, who was slain on the last day of the fight. But near it stands a modern landmark of undisputable authenticity. Lough Mask House was in the early 'eighties the residence of Captain Boycott, against whom was first organized the "boycott" which proved to