the paths down a cliff in Kerry--where boys and tramps came over to
steal and take away any apples or other fruits that were in season.
Above the wall on the three windy sides there were rows of
finely-grown lime trees, the place of meeting in the summer for ten
thousand bees. Under the east wall there was the roof of a
green-house, where one could sit, when it was wet or dry, and watch
the birds and butterflies, many of which were not common. The
seasons were always late in this place--it was high above the
sea--and redpoles often used to nest not far off late in the summer;
siskins did the same once or twice, and greenfinches, till the
beginning of August, used to cackle endlessly in the lime trees.

Everyone is used in Ireland to the tragedy that is bound up with the
lives of farmers and fishing people; but in this garden one seemed
to feel the tragedy of the landlord class also, and of the
innumerable old families that are quickly dwindling away. These
owners of the land are not much pitied at the present day, or much
deserving of pity; and yet one cannot quite forget that they are the
descendants of what was at one time, in the eighteenth century, a
high-spirited and highly-cultivated aristocracy. The broken
greenhouses and mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and
collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in
the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as
the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is
often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go
through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is
likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of
these old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate
girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who
were alive a generation or two ago. Many of the descendants of these