who visit this part of Munster is Kilkee, a little watering-place set above steep cliffs on which the Atlantic swings in with all its weight. There is no other place known to me in western Ireland where you can find decent seaside quarters in a spot that meets the full force and splendour of the sea. And from the Clare coast near by—even out of the window of a railway carriage—I saw one of the greatest prospects that eye could look on. To the south, some thirty or forty miles distant, the Dingle peninsula stretched outward, with the huge mass of Brandon rising out of the blue: but away north-west I could see very clear the three island heights of Aran, and east of them the whole group of Connemara mountains, beyond which again, away up into Mayo, the shapes of Mweelrea and Croagh Patrick were dim yet recognizable in outline.

The day was of astonishing clearness, yet, as so often happens in western Ireland, its clearness had nothing hard: the Atlantic blue was deep and sombre, the mountain shapes, exquisite in line, were vested in colour that had a magic and a mystery all their own. Sunlight across that brine-laden air, across those pungent expanses of bog, is never crudely definite in its revelation; there is a hint of romance and glamour in the pearly shimmer of its brightness.

Clare has noble traditions: and no one should visit it without a pilgrimage to the castle of Carrigaholt on the Shannon estuary near Kilrush; for this was the ancestral home of that branch of the O'Briens who made the ancient name illustrious on every stricken field in Europe. They got their title, the Viscounts Clare, from Charles II, but after the Williamite wars they were attainted; and from Sarsfield's death onward it was always a Lord Clare who commanded the Irish Brigade—that wonderful fighting force whose chief recruiting ground was here in south-western Ireland. Two Lords Clare got their death at the head of their men, one at Massaglia in 1693 when Prince Eugene was beaten: the second at Ramillies, where in the general disaster the Irish Brigade not only saved its own colours, but carried two British standards back to Bruges. The third and last earl, who had refused restitution to all the estates and titles if only he would forswear his religion, led the immortal charge at Fontenoy, when Ireland's banished men snatched in a desperate feat of arms fierce requital for the penal laws that had left them a choice between exile and slavery. Among all the writers who ever handled that period of history, whatever their prepossessions, none ever wrote the name of "Clare's brigade", save with honour and admiration; and no nationalist poet has told their praise so eloquently as the Unionist, Miss Emily Lawless, in two sister poems. One of the two depicts the eve of Fontenoy in the exiles' camp, and the wild stirring in men's hearts. "The wind is wild to-night, and it seems to blow from Clare"—blows with a memory in it and a vision of all that has been left, blows with a promise of things long hoped for, since "Clare's brigade may claim its own" wherever the fight rages.

FERRYBANK, WATERFORD

And the second tells how, on the morrow of the battle, strange craft with strange bodiless sailors were seen on the Western coast, making swift way like homing birds to Corcabascinn, this westernmost barony of Clare.

Yet in truth it may be that only the native born will find any special charm in this stormy Corcabascinn or its wild winds and waters; for of prettiness and favour it has none, owning grandeur rather than beauty. The counties of Munster which appeal to every human being who has eyes in his head to see with are Cork and Kerry—but Kerry above all.

III

The unhappy inconveniences of sea travel prevent most folk from visiting County Cork under the best conditions. Access should be by boat: and surely the entrance into that wonderful Cove where the great liners halt to take off mails is noblest of all gateways into Ireland. All the encircling ring of hills is rich with vegetation, but above all on the east by Queenstown is the choicest and most varied wooding. Anything will grow there and nearly everything has been made to grow. The little town itself is picturesque, climbing the steep slope and dominated by Pugin's great cathedral, which stands on the disembarkation quay, making a centre for the last impressions and emotions of those—alas! how many thousands yearly—who leave Ireland.

It is not now as I saw it in the early 'eighties, when hopeless, broken, half-famished peasants were pouring out in a ghastly torrent, mere wreckage on the flood: emigration was then eighty thousand a year, to-day it is less than half that number. Those who go to-day, go reasonably equipped, go for the most part to friends in cities, of which they have heard so much, where they have so many kindred and acquaintances, that the journey seems hardly into exile—hardly to a strange land. Yet, even to-day, every train that brings the emigrants leaves behind it, through the West and South and Midlands, its wake of bitter weeping; at station after station it has gone out amid tearing away of locked hands, last embraces severed, faces of old men twitching, faces of women convulsed with sobs, and sped on its journey to the accompaniment of that dreadful heartrending "keene", the Irish wail, which is heard nowadays more often at the ship's side, or on the railway platform, than at the grave. "Och, the poor soft Irish," I heard a woman say this year, leaving some platform in Cork; on her way, evidently, to a home in the States, where she had lived, no doubt for many years, with the hard-faced, swaggering Yankee, who accompanied her, and who looked with ill-concealed contempt on the tears and emotions of the "poor soft Irish"; but she at least still kept the homely tongue and kind heart.

From Queenstown up to Cork is one of the loveliest waterways in the world, little towns on either bank under the steep wooded shores, and here and there some old castle. Cork itself may have no very great architectural beauties, but the whole lie of the city, spread between its hills, divided by the various streams of that delightful river, makes a beauty of its own: you see it best from the high ground over against the famous steeple where hang "the bells of Shandon that sound so grand on the pleasant waters of the river Lee".

"Pleasant" is the word for Cork, the county, and its soft-voiced, quick-speaking people, with the odd little turn upwards at the end of their sentence. It was called "the Athens of Ireland", though I would say rather, the Naples: in any case, Cork has always sent out far more than its share of brains. In the days of "Father Prout", who wrote the "Bells of Shandon" and other immortal ditties, Cork had a