table with grandees, but I do not like to be in
company with three frouzy dames who take
nothing but mutton-broth and dry toast, and
with a herd of men who eat on an average five
helpings apiece, beginning with a thick slice of
hot fat bacon. What astonished me most was
that nothing but water was drunk, except by
the three ladies and the priests. Nor was a
word spoken, except by the same six. Everybody
seemed solemnly impressed with the duty of eating
out his half-crown's worth; and, verily,
although meat is at sixpence a pound, and the
only pudding was a morsel of corn-flour
blancmanger with wine-sauce, and though—more
Hibernico—they gave no cheese, I am sure
some of the diners left Miss Ryan a very small
margin for profit.

There was no bar for post-prandial liquoring at
Miss Ryan's; the habit seemed to be to have
the "materials" taken up to the bedrooms.
At least, my clerical friends were grouped round
cozy glasses of punch when I went up to say
good-bye to them. I could not stay in
Lisdoonvarna. I dreaded what breakfast might
be. So I just saw the "spas," which are curious
enough—a magnesia water, a chalybeate,
and a sulphur spring, all pretty near each other
in the gorge of a wild stream which has
hollowed out a way through the black shale that
looks as if the coal which is always making
itself expected in Irish strata had here at last
actually cropped out. Alas! it is only the look!
In another spot there are two springs, sulphur
and iron, within a hand's breadth of each other.
Lisdoonvarna ought to be the Harrowgate of
Ireland. I am sure its sulphur water is nasty
enough, and smells strongly enough in a hot sun
to warrant the adoption of the title; but then
a sulphur spa above all others wants baths, and
there is no corporation here, as in Bath or Buxton,
to pet the "waters," and lose so many
hundred a year on them for the good of the
town. Lisdoonvarna is blessed with a landlord
who won't grant a single lease, and who raises
the rent the moment his tenants show any
signs of improving their habitations. So the
wonder is that the "lodges" are as good as they
are, and everybody exclaims against the
recklessness of the other hotel-keeper, who has been
building, and has really made a grand coffee-room,
on ground his lease of which, held from
a former proprietor, has only a few years to run.
I can't help thinking that the strange blindness
which Irish landlords show to their own
interests and to those of the country is the real
secret of Ireland's backwardness. If they
would do as English landlords do, either make
the improvements themselves or make it worth
their tenants' while to make them, instead of
acting in a way which bars all improvement,
things would go on as merrily as in the old
ditty, where the fire begins to burn the stick,
the stick to beat the dog, and so forth. Until
this happens, I fear that, despite all the efforts
of Dr. Apjohn of Dublin to make known the
virtues of its waters, Lisdoonvarna must
remain for most people, except the lower and
middle-class Irish of Munster, just what it is
now—a patch of white houses (some, by the
way, surprisingly good and well-furnished) in,
the midst of a dreary peat bog.

I became so extravagant in my anxiety to
get out of the "spa," that I actually went
the length of taking a car all to myself for
Ballyvaughan, on the Clare side of Galway Bay,
where I heard there would be a chance of
getting across to Galway for a shilling. A drearier
country than that between these two places it
is hard to imagine. Every time I come to
Ireland I wonder more and more at our strange
popular errors about it.

But the greatest mistake is to talk of Ireland
as immensely fertile, and only kept back by the
laziness of its inhabitants. There are very rich
tracts in Ireland, but there is also a very large
amount of very poor land. Peat bog is not an
encouraging soil, especially when the subsoil is
hungry sand. But peat bog can, by the hard
labour of squatters, enticed by a four years'
immunity from rent, and then "strung up
pretty high" when they have got their ground
into order, be made to bear something. The
rocks of Burren and a good deal more of the
county of Clare cannot by any possibility
produce aught but mutton—excellent indeed, but
very small, and at the rate of so few sheep to the
acre that the rent of a "bulk" of rock-land is a
scarcely appreciable quantity. Imagine a bare
flat surface of white limestone, and fancy a
giant setting himself to plough this in single
ridges. Suppose, moreover, that besides being
a foolish giant for his pains, he has taken a
glass too much, so that his plough works
unevenly, swaying a little from side to side, while
the furrows are sometimes too close, at other
times so wide apart as to leave quite a strip of
limestone between them. Then let grass, and
wild thyme, and cistus, grow up in the furrows;
and let the bare rock between be weather-worn
and split and seamed, and carved with what
some enthusiasts call "Druid basins," and
sometimes so rubbed away along the edges of
a whole ridge that, with its hollows and
protuberances, it looks like the backbone of some
great monster; and, when you have done all
this, you will have some notion of the Clare
sheep-walks. If, instead of a level, you have
a hill, you find it terraced, each terrace with its
own perpendicular wall, until you begin to
think that this must be Edom, not Ireland, and
that those rock-walls, with what might well
stand for doorways marked upon them, belong
to the necropolis of some Celtic Petra. That,
alternating with and relieved by bog (for bog
is to me infinitely less depressing than such a
stony wilderness), is the sort of country through
which I drove to Ballyvaughan, a little fishing-town
which lies in an amphitheatre of terraced
hills such as I have tried to describe, and down
into which the descent is by a road
appropriately named the corkscrew.

At Ballyvaughan (which consists at most of
twenty-five houses, so that the idea of staying a
night there was terrible) I dashed along to the