years past it has been the favourite touring ground of holiday-makers from the crowded manufacturing district of South Lancashire; and this, perhaps, has rather tended to discourage those quiet lovers of Nature who, though not exactly addicted to taking their pleasures sadly, at any rate prefer to enjoy occasional solitude, and do not always appreciate the joys of a noisy crowd. Douglas, indeed, in the season is crowded with merry trippers, who pour into it from steamer after steamer, and tax its accommodation to the breaking point. And what is true of Douglas is perhaps also true, in a modified degree, of Ramsey, and even of Port Erin and Peel. These, of course, are centres from which brakes and char-à-bancs and waggonettes perambulate every corner of the island; even the culminating summit of Snaefell itself is now climbed by a double line of electric railway, and crowned by a huge hotel. "Pretty as the island is," says Mr. Haskett Smith, "its hills are nothing more than hills, except where they are also railways or tea-gardens." Tea-gardens, no doubt, are abundantly in evidence; and there is scarcely a glen in the whole island that is not rigorously kept under lock and key, and only to be opened at a price. The tripper element, again, in the Isle of Man is probably responsible for the absence of the old-fashioned mountain inns—like Wastdale Head, in Cumberland, or Penygwryd, near Snowdon—that form so pleasant a feature among the mountains of England and Wales. There even was once a dancing saloon in the lonely recesses of Injebreck; and no one who loves mountains tolerates dancing in their secret recesses, unless indeed it be the fairies dancing their "ringlets to the whistling wind."

Most people indeed who love Nature will avoid Mona in the "season"; but luckily the "season" is short. From October to Easter the lodging houses are empty, and the island lives its own peculiar life. It is remarkable, indeed, how little permanent harm has been done to its pleasant landscapes by this yearly incursion of the southern Goths and Vandals. Fashion has not dotted its hills with villas, as Windermere has been dotted, and to some extent Ambleside and Coniston. The two streams of life that meet here in summer flow together for a time side by side, but do not seem to commingle. Go there in spring when the fields are full of lambs, and the hedgerows are yellow with primroses. Climb the rolling moorlands that are still red with winter bents, and wander along the hills that drop into the sea so steeply between Peel and Bradda Head. Linger in the old churchyards at Kirk Maughold and Kirkmichael among the immemorial cross-slabs of a long since vanished race; sit among the ruins of St. Patrick's Island—broken cathedral and broken castle, old, mysterious round tower, and ruined pre-Conquest church—till the place is peopled again with dead voices and dead faces, and till the whole island

DOUGLAS BAY (A MIDSUMMER NIGHT).
A panoramic view of the town from Douglas Head.

You will receive no rude shock in the course of your wandering, nor necessarily encounter a single "tripper." In this way most certainly, but in this way alone, you will "pluck out the heart of [the] mystery" of pleasant, green "Ellan Vannin."

CHAPTER II

CONCERNING PEEL

There is hardly a pleasanter spot in the island from which to explore its beauties than Peel. Situated on its west coast, at a point sufficiently equidistant from its north and south extremities, and as much out of reach of the corrupting influence of Douglas as any centre well can be in an island of such insignificant dimensions, Peel is not merely an admirable centre from which to make excursions, but in itself is one of the quaintest and most picturesque of little towns. Castletown, in fact, is its only possible Manx rival, and Castletown ranks below it by a very long interval. The inland parts of the town, no doubt, are dull, as new parts of most towns are apt to be everywhere; but the ancient nucleus of the place, at the exact point where the little River Neb flows out into the sea, and St. Patrick's Island (which is now no longer an island, but an artificial peninsula), are as picturesque and old-fashioned as anyone can wish. St. Patrick's Island, indeed, whether viewed at close quarters from the little pier on the opposite side of the harbour—where sometimes at night one almost stumbles over piles of freshly caught fish that are left there to glimmer and glint in the moonlight—or seen from a distance from the coast to the north of Peel Bay, is probably the most striking object in the whole Kingdom of Man. Possibly the Rock of Cashel, which the writer has never seen, is crowded with points of interest as many and as diverse: nowhere else, he fancies, in the range of the British seas is it possible to discover such variety of interest concentrated in a space so diminutive as this. Here is an old castle and a ruined palace, a round tower, a roofless cathedral, and an old pre-Conquest church. None by itself is of great importance, but the aggregate (bounded in seven acres) is imposing in its "infinite variety." The round tower, of course, has analogies in Ireland, and at Abernethy, Egilsay, and Brechin, in Scotland; but is absolutely without parallel in England. Much learning has been expended on the meaning of these structures, which were possibly nothing more or less than places of refuge, strange as their shape may appear for this purpose, for people to take shelter in times of sudden scare. The Peel round tower, however, differs from its Scottish and Irish neighbours in being of one uniform diameter from bottom to finish, not tapering like the others towards its top. The cathedral of St. Germain, now derelict and roofless, exhibits more distinctive architectural features than any other old church in the island. Parts of it date from the thirteenth century; and many bishops of Sodor and Man have been buried inside its walls. One of these, Samuel Rutter, who died in 1662, is commemorated still by an inscription so quaint—it is easy to believe that it was written by himself—that we may be pardoned for setting out most of it at length: "In hac domo quam A vermiculis accepi confratribus meis, spe Resurrectionis ad vitam, Jaceo Sam, Permissione divina Episcopus Hujus Insulae. Siste Lector vide ac ride palatium episcopi. Obiit XXX° die mensis Maij anno 1662." This is very wittily Englished thus in Black's guide-book:

The crypt below the church is said once to have been used as a prison for Eleanor