course into abeyance in the Dark Ages, but
was resumed at some time in the fifteenth
century. After the expulsion of the Moors
the mine was given as a present to the
religious knights of Calatrava, and it reverted
finally to the Crown more than three
centuries ago.

The present workings are not quite on the
old spot. Fugger Brothers, of Augsburg,
farmed it in those past days; and having
drawn a fortune out of it, by which they
became a byword for wealth (" Rich as a Fucar,"
say the Spanish miners still), they gave up
their lease as worthless. Government could
make nothing of the mine, and therefore
caused the ground to be attentively explored.
The extraordinary deposit upon which the
miners now are operating was in that way
discovered.

AN IRISH STEW.

I HAVE found them! The rags, the bones,
the sawdust and the dirt, which I was at
first unable, as I endeavoured to explain in
a former paper, to discover in Dublin. But
I have found them now. Not in Sackville
Street, or Westmoreland Street, or Dame
Street, or Grafton Street; not in aristocratic
Merrion Square or College, or Stephen's
Green; not in the Phœnix Park—but in
the Coombe.

A swift steam-engine has wafted me from
the ancient city of Chester, across, or rather
through the great tubular bridge, through
the picturesque Welsh country, by a
multiplicity of stations whose names, being
utterly unpronounceable, it would be a waste
of time to transcribe here, to the promontorial
port called Holyhead. Whence a sea-monster
has borne me across St. George's
Channel. It has borne me to the clean
sparkling suburb of Kingstown—once an
unaristocratic, humble, lobster-smelling little
village, called Dunleary, but since the visit
of the Georgium Sidus  to Ireland, in
eighteen hundred and twenty-one, baptised,
and thenceforward known as Kingstown. I
may observe, however, that while he was
about it, the regal toucher of the evil of
nomenclature might have changed the three
stations on the road between Kingstown and
Dublin: Booterstown, Black Rock, and Salt
Hill, into Pump-ville, Jet-ornament, and
Salinopoplis, or something pretty of that
description.

So I have come to Dublin, and I have
taken my fill of the monuments and public
buildings, and of the Industrial Exhibition.
But I have been keeping a wary look-out
meanwhile in the rag and bone interest:
hence I found myself in the Coombe. I did
not know then theat the Coombe was the
Coombe, so I straggled out of it again,
bewildered, dazed, in a labyrinth of dirty streets,
rubbing the eyes of my mind as one of the
Seven Sleepers might have rubbed his
corporeal eyes on his first ramble after his nap.
The Lord Lieutenant (whose carriage I
stopped to see sweep out of the Vice-regal
yard into Dame Street) was the primary cause
of my wandering Coombe-wise; but a personage
somewhat removed from him in worldly
station and appearance was the secondary
loadstone which pointed to this pole. This was
no other than a Dublin fishwoman, very
much disguised or rather undisguised in rage
and alcohol, who was scattering the flowers
of her eloquence broadcast on a female with
a barrow at the door of a whisky shop—the
casus belli being a disputed question as to the
right of property in a flat-iron—here called a
"smooth."—" Isn't it the smooth that's
mine? " and " Sure it's not a skirrick of it
that's yours," were bandied about for some
time, till the dealer in molluscœ, after the
manner of persons quarrelling, diverged from
the main point at issue to some retrospective
griefs and torts by her suffered at the hands
of her opponent. " Isn't it yerself," demanded
this female Demosthenes in a concluding
Philippic, " that daren't go to chapel, forbye
Father M'Anasser forbad ye ivery brick of
it? Isn't it yerself that kem down only
Wednesday was a fortnight to the corner of
the Coombe, foreninst the whole world and
called me a murthering ould excommunicated
gaseometer?" With which latter trope
she folded her arms and looked oyster-knives
at her enemy.

At the corner of the Coombe! Where was
the Coombe? I had heard that St. Patrick's
Cathedral, which I was anxious to to see,
was down in the Coombe, but the guide-books
were all silent as to where the
Coombe was. I found the Coombe—which
is indeed a very long, straggling estuary
between houses (I cannot call it a street)
running from the bottom of Francis Street
to Ardee Street and Pimlico, and possessing
vomitoria seemingly innumerable, in the
shape of lanes, back streets, courts, and
blind alleys—to be a thoroughfare of the
same description as its neighbour, with a
strong additional dash of Petticoat Lane,
Broker's Row in Birmingham and Newgate
Market; but with an almost indescribable
aspect of dirt and confustion, semi-continental
picturesqueness, shabbiness—less the
shabbiness of dirt than that of untidiness—over-
population and frowsiness generally,
perfectly original and peculiarly its own. I
wandered up and down and about the
Coombe for hours, until I was hungry, thirsty,
and tired, and I would strongly advise all
travellers in Ireland, all painters of still like
and genre subjects, and lovers of the picturesque
catholicity, by no means to omit a
walk in the Coombe when they visit Dublin,
the silence of the guide books and the
ciceroni notwithstanding. Let me see if I can,
in my small way, recall a few of the oddities
I saw.

First the old clothes.  A man who has seen