attributable in no way to the fault of Millreagh, but entirely to the
inscrutable design of Providence which arranged that Port Michael, and
not Kirkmull, should lie on the opposite side of the Irish Sea; and
every Sunday morning, after church, and sometimes on Sunday afternoon,
the people walk along the breakwater to the lighthouse and remind each
other of the days when their town was of consequence. "We spent a
hundred and fifty thousand pounds on our harbour," they say to each
other, "and then the Scotch went and did the like of that!"--the like
of that being their stupidity in living in an exposed situation.
Millreagh does not admit that it has suffered any more than a temporary
diminishment of its greatness, and it makes optimistic and boastful
prophecies of the fortune and repute that will come to it when the
engineers make a tunnel between Scotland and Ireland. Sometimes an
article on the Channel Tunnel will appear in the _Newsletter_ or
the _Whig_, and for weeks afterwards Millreagh lives in a fever of
expectancy; for whatever else may be said about the Tunnel, this is
certain to be said of it, that it will start, in Ireland, from
Millreagh. On that brilliant hope, Millreagh, tightening its belt,
lives in a fair degree of happiness, eking out its present poverty by
fishing and by letting lodgings in the summer.

Pickie, too, has much reputation, more, perhaps, than Millreagh, for it
is a popular holiday town and was once described in the _Evening
Telegraph_ as "the Blackpool of Ireland." This description, although
it was apt enough, offended the more pretentious people in Pickie who
were only mollified when the innocent reporter, in a later article,
altered the description to, "the Brighton of Ireland." With consummate
understanding of human character, he added, remembering the Yacht Club,
that perhaps the most accurate description of Pickie would be "the
Cowes of Ireland." In this way, the reporter, who subsequently became a