Some one has said that almost all that Ireland possesses of picturesque
beauty is to be found on, or in the immediate neighbourhood of, the
seaboard; and if we except some brief patches of river scenery on the Nore
and the Blackwater, and a part of Lough Erne, the assertion is not devoid
of truth. The dreary expanse called the Bog of Allen, which occupies a
tableland in the centre of the island, stretches away for miles--flat,
sad-coloured, and monotonous, fissured in every direction by channels of
dark-tinted water, in which the very fish take the same sad colour. This
tract is almost without trace of habitation, save where, at distant
intervals, utter destitution has raised a mud-hovel, undistinguishable from
the hillocks of turf around it.

Fringing this broad waste, little patches of cultivation are to be seen:
small potato-gardens, as they are called, or a few roods of oats, green
even in the late autumn; but, strangely enough, with nothing to show
where the humble tiller of the soil is living, nor, often, any visible
road to these isolated spots of culture. Gradually, however--but very
gradually--the prospect brightens. Fields with inclosures, and a cabin or
two, are to be met with; a solitary tree, generally an ash, will be seen;
some rude instrument of husbandry, or an ass-cart, will show that we are
emerging from the region of complete destitution and approaching a land of
at least struggling civilisation. At last, and by a transition that is not
always easy to mark, the scene glides into those rich pasture-lands and
well-tilled farms that form the wealth of the midland counties. Gentlemen's
seats and waving plantations succeed, and we are in a country of comfort
and abundance.

On this border-land between fertility and destitution, and on a tract which