peasants whom one sees, however, are affable and hospitable, especially
when they hear you are from that terrestrial heaven whither most of
their friends and relatives have gone before them. They seem simple and
primitive enough at first sight, and yet they are as strange and
incomprehensible a race as any in the world. They are as superstitious,
as credulous of marvels, fairies, magicians, and omens, as the men whom
St. Patrick preached to, and at the same time they are shrewd,
skeptical, sensible, and bottomless liars. Upon the whole, I met with
no nation on my travels whose company I enjoyed so much, or who
inspired me with so much kindliness, curiosity, and repugnance.

"At length I got to a place on the sea-coast, which I will not further
specify than to say that it is not many miles from Ballymacheen, on the
south shore. I have seen Venice and Naples, I have driven along the
Cornice Road, I have spent a month at our own Mount Desert, and I say
that all of them together are not so beautiful as this glowing, deep-
hued, soft-gleaming, silvery-lighted, ancient harbor and town, with the
tall hills crowding round it and the black cliffs and headlands
planting their iron feet in the blue, transparent sea. It is a very old
place, and has had a history which it has outlived ages since. It may
once have had two or three thousand inhabitants; it has scarce five or
six hundred to day. Half the houses are in ruins or have disappeared;
many of the remainder are standing empty. All the people are poor, most
of them abjectly so; they saunter about with bare feet and uncovered
heads, the women in quaint black or dark-blue cloaks, the men in such
anomalous attire as only an Irishman knows how to get together, the
children half naked. The only comfortable-looking people are the monks
and the priests, and the soldiers in the fort. For there is a fort
there, constructed on the huge ruins of one which may have done duty in
the reign of Edward the Black Prince, or earlier, in whose mossy