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NOW most of the rooms of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof,' is the advice which Fuller gives to persons about to travel; and no doubt at his time it was very proper and necessary advice. Travel was then in some degree a course of study, forming a part of the education of every cultivated man, and as such had its elements, its A B C and first principles to be made up, before the student was fit to deal with its more advanced branches. But progress has done away with the necessity for so roundabout a method of instruction; since then the schoolmaster himself has been abroad, and saves us a world of trouble by allowing us to reap the benefit of his experience. Why should we travel for knowledge when a quarter's schooling in any select academy teaches us more about the cities and manners of men than poor Ulysses was able to pick up in all those weary years of cruising? Is it not written in the geography book that the Spaniard is arrogant, haughty, and vindictive; that the Frenchman is vain and frivolous; the German phlegmatic, &c. &c. P and does not Pinnock tell us to a hide what the exports of Russia are, and how many artichokes are grown annually at Jerusalem ? With such curious and accurate information ready to our hand, it is needless to go through the severe discipline that our less fortunate forefathers had to undergo. When we travel, all we have to do is to enjoy ourselves as fully as the length of our holiday and purse may permit; and if other countries are more favourable to this end, there is no reason why they should not have a preference over our own. Instinct leads the holiday seeker to look for as complete a change of scene as is possible. Now and then, it is true, when John Gilpin gets a day to himself, he will go in for a little quiet domestic carpentery by way of relaxation, mend all the chairs that have been broken within the last six months,

glue a new tail into the bluff stern of Gilpin junior's spotted steed, and make a gallant but fruitless attempt to put up a roller for the jack-towel behind the kitchen door. But in general his impulse will be to rush out of town, and go and dine at Edmonton. And so on a larger scale, when a man has a month or six weeks to devote to his recrea tion, he will in most cases transplant himself for that time as completely as he can. It is just because we are a nation of shopkeepers that we are such gadabouts; it is because we stick closely to desk and counter for eleven months that we fly as far as possible from them for the twelfth, and one of the most satisfactory proofs that the French really mean to become a commercial nation, and are taking seriously to business habits, is that they are to be found in greater and greater numbers every year enjoying their just measure of idleness beyond the frontiers of that Belle France they are so proud of. The Lago Mag giore may not be as lovely as Windermere or Killarney, or the Rhine as beautiful as the Thames, but they make the reality of the holiday more apparent, and this, even laying aside their advantages in a pecuniary point of view, is enough to turn the scale in their favour.

If the west coast of Ireland is here suggested as being worth exploitation, it is not out of any deference to that absurd notion that we have no business to go abroad until we have seen everything that is worth seeing at home. It is simply because to many, and espe cially to the cockney, it offers as complete a change of scene as can be obtained in any foreign country, because it affords rare opportunities for free and independent rambling, and is, as yet at least, wonderfully little spoiled by the invading tourist and his faithful camp-followers. Indeed, Connemara is not likely ever to become very popular with these gentry. Its beauties are not sufficiently of the rose-water school,

and lie scattered over too great a surface. There are none of those choice spots where broad blue lakes, set in soft woods and delicately rounded hills, tempt enterprise to build a huge hotel, and sentimentality to come, per excursion ticket, and smooth its chin and sleek its hair, and say the earth is beautiful. There are none of those luscious landscapes which seem to have been expressly composed for the tinted paper of the album, or the act drop of a minor theatre. The scenery of Connemara, and the country to the north of it, is altogether of a breezier and more vigorous sort. Tall cliffs, with the green Atlantic heaving beneath them; lordly mountains, with its mists curling round their grey heads; lonely bays, studded with islands and rocks, where the seals doze in the sun, with the cormorants to mount guard over them ; wild glens, and noisy streams, and dark tarns; long stretches of purple heath and brown moor, where the plover wheel and the grouse challenge. This is for the most part the sort of thing which the pilgrim will find in the district just named. Even the ruins that meet the eye here and there, the sturdy square strongholds of Grace O'Malley and the O'Flahertys, have a thickset, masculine look about them, as if they despised the notion of being picturesque and interesting, like other old castles that have been weak enough to give in to the conventionalities of society.

Generally speaking, the traveller, having reached Galway, is recommended to make directly for the coast at Clifden, by way of Oughterard and Ballinahinch.

But a

sail up Lough Corrib and a day spent at Cong is a far better way of commencing operations. A strange spot is this Cong: indeed, how could a place with such a queer Chinese sounding name help being more or less eccentric. Not that the little town itself sets up any pretensions to originality of character, for architecturally and socially it is much as other towns in the West, having a chapel and a meeting-house and an inn, and one or two instances of that sort of emporium described in the dialect of the country as a 'gro

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cery,' and dealing in soap, crockery, whip-handles, tenpenny nails, not to speak of another article, the purchasers of which come out ever and anon wiping their mouths upon their sleeves. But the site on which it has settled itself is one which it is difficult to imagine any sane village would have selected, unless under pressure of circumstances, or for some very special reason. It lies between the two lakes, Mask and Corrib, on a plain of limestone compared with which Arabia Petræa is probably a water meadow, and Stony Stratford a place remarkable for tropical luxuriance of vegetation. As you cross this sheet of rock a mysterious sound of rushing water constantly strikes the ear, and you find that you are in fact upon a vast bridge, under which the surplus waters of Lough Mask are burrowing their way down to the lower lake. In some spots they come bubbling up through the stone as if they were seized with a sudden desire for fresh air and daylight, and flow along equably for a few yards, but very soon finding that all is barren they go down again with a dissatisfied gurgle, and grumble away to the southward, until they make common cause with similarly disappointed streams, and push for the nearest patch of clay, where they assert themselves as an independent river. There are other places, where the roof of the tunnel has fallen in, affording a glimpse of a weird cavern with a ghostly river flowing through it, and in the largest of these resides the oldest inhabitant of Cong, the celebrated White Trout, the subject of many a legend. Any gentleman who may be studying the supernatural for dramatic purposes, will do well to visit Cong, and descend into this grotto under the guidance of the wild woman who shows it; for in her hands the exhibition has quite the air of an incantation. After evoking the Trout, who is understood to be a spellbound princess of great beauty and accomplishments, but nevertheless may be seen in a dark pool at your feet wagging her tail with perfect affability, and staring at you in an unconcerned and even stolid manner, your chantress makes up and ignites a number of straw torches,

one

which are sent floating down the stream, lighting up the black swirling river and the dripping roof and glistening sides of the cave, until one by one they expire with a doleful hiss, and are swept like lost souls into the moaning darkness. Altogether it is a strange scene, and very well calculated to excite valuable emotion in persons who deal in that article. The White Trout is of course, and it is to be hoped always will be, held sacred-indeed, the consequences of any attempt on her life are said to be serious; but there is no lack in these holes of humbler members of the same family, who, not having the good fortune to have been born albinoes, may be taken and fried with perfect impunity. By the way, no should attempt Connemara without fishing tackle, for almost every. where opportunities occur which would have made a fisherman of Dr. Johnson himself. It is not absolutely necessary to encumber yourself with a rod, for a sporting spirit is pretty widely diffused throughout the country, and the landlord of your inn will always be able to lend or borrow one for you. But there is no great difficulty in stowing away a couple of castinglines, a few flies, and materials for making more; and perhaps, if you do not object to it on principle, a bottle of preserved salmon roe-of course, to be tried only where the fly is useless. At Cong the proper time is night, and the means a white moth, which may be constructed for the occasion with some of the fur of a white hat and a feather drawn out of your pillow. Thus prepared, you go clattering over the rocks, which ring out like metal under your feet, letting your fly spin like a fleck of foam in one black cauldron after another, taking care if there be a moon to keep your shadow off the water; until a dull oily sound, as of some one swallowing an oyster hard by, produces an instinctive movement of the wrist, and out of the gloom something comes spinning which kicks and glistens at your feet in the moonlight, and which you contemplate with the exultation and hardness of heart inseparable from such a moment. As you look at your victim and see what a deep,

broad-backed, well-fed little fellow he is, you begin to comprehend the mystery of Cong. The town owes its existence to the abbey, the. remains of which are still visible; and the monks of old, although, as we have often been told, a jolly crew, knew perfectly well what they were about. With such trout as this it is easy to conceive a man enduring the rigours of Lent with edifying fortitude; besides which, now that you come to look at it closely, the spot is by no means so inhospitable as at first sight appears. There are broad cracks and fissures running through the limestone in every direction, and in these there grows a grass remarkably soft, tender, and, as Mr. Gerald Massey would say, lush in quality; just as the most succulent morsels of the sheep lie in the crevices of the blade-bone. doubt many a juicy saddle was waxing fat in these unsuspected little pastures, while the religious world was extolling with pitying admiration the rigid asceticism of the worthy monks of Cong, those pious conies dwelling among the rocks for purposes of self-mortification. With what humorous satisfaction the excellent old fellows must have contemplated their reputation for austerity; and what a joke it must have been to hear Brother Flanagan forestall Shallow's

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Barren, barren, barren; beggars all, Sir John;-marry, good air,' accompanying the remark with a sly dig in Brother Casey's ribs, as they took some rich stranger up to the belfry of the abbey, and showed him a prospect bleak enough even now, but infinitely more so in the ninth or tenth century. Poor old birds! the coy snugness of their nest was their ruin eventually, if there is any truth in the story about the lady who was so smitten with the comfort of the abbey and the flavour of its trout, that she gave her husband no rest until he had rooted out the holy men and settled himself in their place.

Cong, lying between the two lakes which form the eastern boundary of Connemara, acts as the gateway by which you enter that district. The first stage is to Maam, an easy walk, or, if you prefer it, a sail, for one of the many creeks

of Lough Corrib penetrates thus far into the mountains. On a low island near the head of the lake stand the ruins of the Hen's Castle, so called because the wife of one O'Flaherty the Cock defended it valiantly against the foes of her lord. Every side you turn you meet with relics and legends of this sort, all belonging to the period when this region was significantly named Jar-Connaught, not that the rest of Connaught, according to all accounts, was remarkable for its freedom from discord. After the old chieftains were killed off, and their strongholds reduced to mere features in the landscape, there seems to have succeeded a reign of rapparees, and many are the stories and many the spots consecrated by the feats of Macnamara and his mare Moreen, Davy the Devil, and others whose memory is much respected by a grateful posterity, on whom they never had any oppor tunity of levying black mail. It is sad to think that heroes of such daring and ingenuity should have so wasted their fine genius on mean and ignoble objects. Men with not a tithe of their abilities were every day dying in ruffles at Tyburn, with a sympathizing crowd around them, while these inglorious ruffians were frittering away their youth and intellect upon some fair-going small farmer, or stray traveller with a purseful of Mr. Wood's brass halfpence. Yet there is something stoical in this absence of ambition, this choice of cheap immortality in the pages of the chap-book, in preference to the garish renown of the Newgate Calendar. Peace be with their ashes, humble local miscreants. If they did nothing more, at least they have contrived to invest many a lonely rock and rugged pass with a kind of homely romance that suits the wild unkempt scenery.

For a hermit who, renouncing the world, still clings to its fleshpots, and entertains doubts as to the wholesomeness of the crystal spring and the dinner of herbs, the little inn at Maam would make an excellent experimental cell. Here, shut in by noble purple mountains, with the bright waters of the lake stretching away to the southward, and

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nothing to break the silence but the rushing of the stream that runs down the valley, and the piping of the curlews on the shore, he can have solitude, salmon, mountain mutton, meditation, hare, grouse, and whisky, all in a degree of perfection that is rarely attainable. Following the glen that runs to the right, you come to the village of Leenane, at the head of the famous Killery harbour, and here Connemara may be said to commence in earnest. It is difficult at first to realize the fact that the strip of water before you winding its way off westward among the mountains, is actually a portion of the Atlantic. It looks far more like a wilder and grander Rhine, stripped of its vineyards and old castles, than an arm of the sea. But there is an unmistakeable briny flavour in the breeze that sweeps up the valley. The rocks are fringed with brown seaweed that floats out and then hangs dripping as the sleepy tidal swell comes rolling by. Out in midchannel the gulls are wheeling and dipping with hungry cries, or riding serenely at anchor with all the indolence of repletion; and here and there the glossy round head of a seal comes up and goes down again after a cursory inspection of the upper world. On each side mountains, inlaid with green, purple, and grey of a vividness that seems peculiar to the Irish highlands, rise abruptly from the water, broken by an occasional gorge, down which a little stream leaps eagerly, as if aware of the impossibility of its ever becoming a great river, and anxious to be a part of the mighty ocean with as little delay as possible. At some distance up one of these lies Delphi, a spot so called because it affords good salmon fishing—at least, if you have a pocket Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, you may amuse yourself with trying to find some other reason-and opposite to this the road takes advantage of a valley that runs southward, and leaves the water side. This the tourist in general follows from a distrust, not altogether unfounded, of the region that lies right ahead of him. By so doing, however, he misses the grandest portions of the Killery. The mountains grow steeper and

wilder, and the inlet seems more completely landlocked at every step as you approach its mouth; until at last, just as you are beginning to doubt its existence, the broad Atlantic bursts suddenly on the view, and through the gap in front of you, you see far away the white horses racing for the shore; and the great mass of Mulrea, the noblest of the Western Mountains, standing out like a huge buttress against the ocean. Nothing is easier than to pay the noisy homage of big words to a scene of this sort; but Pelion piled on Ossa in the shape of adjective and epithet is not description; and a grateful silence is sometimes a higher tribute of admiration than any amount of wordy rapture. 'It was not for me,' said Dr. Johnson, to bandy civilities with my Sovereign; and when brought face to face with a majesty which is not of man's institution, are we to treat it with less deference ?

Far better to lie down for a while on the soft short grass of the mountain-side, and listen to the roar of the waves, and watch the changing shadows of the clouds, and then go on your way rejoicing because you saw, and, in the words of that shortest and fullest of criticisms on nature, saw that it was good. It is true you pay something for your enjoyment by being forced to put up with such accommodation as a poor fishing village can offer, still, even this has an advantage in giving a double relish to a morning swim off the rocks of Ballinakill Bay. On these Connemara cliffs one has a queer feeling of satisfaction, somewhat like that produced by reaching the top of a high mountain, a sort of sensation of you-can't-go-furtherness which other of our coasts never give. The Atlantic does not look wider than the English Channel or the German Ocean, but then the consciousness that it is the Atlantic, that you are on the very rim and edge of Europe, and that the nearest land ahead is another world, this makes all the difference. A plunge off these rocks, too, is a very different thing from a bathe at Hastings or Brighton. Here is no tide that creeps up along the sand. Yonder giant that comes rolling towards you was born a week ago

off the coast of Labrador. He has joined in boisterous games of leapfrog with frisky schools of young whales at play in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream; gurgled and moaned in the blue crevices of the drifting iceberg; washed the weather-beaten deck of the poor abandoned; held converse with the great sea serpent on the failure of the transatlantic telegraph. And now he hoists you up on his broad green shoulders, and for a moment you seem to see the uttermost parts of the earth, then, dropping you as the eagle did the ambitious tortoise in the fable, he dashes on over the rocks, pouring himself in cascades into the pools, rousing up the sea anemones that are winking at the bottom, and the starfish stretching their five lazy limbs on the soft sand, and growing hoary and garrulous as his end approaches, dies with a bellow at the foot of the cliff. Another experience which you must make is that of a corragh voyage. The corragh is a description of boat peculiar to this coast, and probably in date ranks immediately after Noah's ark. Like that early specimen of naval architecture, it is pitched within and without, so if you have any regard for your trousers you will take a bunch of dried seaweed to sit upon; but its construction is on the whole far simpler, and involves a much smaller outlay of capital. It consists of a frame of timber, looking suspiciously like barrel-hoops with a canvas covering strained over it, the whole being kept from collapsing by two or three laths on which the rowers sit. These, a race of fishermen of strange prejudices, who eat not lobster, neither do they swim, pull each a pair of sculls, which work on a pin instead of in rowlocks. The extreme lightness of the whole affair is such that a man can carry it on his back with perfect ease, and a string of fishers so laden, seen from the cliffs above, looks exactly like a detachment of black beetles patrolling the beach. Consequently it bobs about in the roughest ses like a feather, and is quite safe, notwithstanding that the lithe framework bends and writhes in a manner ogglesome to behold when you are three miles from land; and