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sively years and scenes of distance and remoteness passed, in thick coming visions, before his memory; then by a sudden effort of volition, as one

"Not framed, upon the torture of the mind To lie in restless ecstasy,"

he changed at once his mood of thought, and elevated position, and descending rapidly from the rock, sprung upon his horse, galloped towards the dismantled park wall, cleared it at a leap, and proceeded on his way to the Peninsula of Dunore.

Whatever was the mission of this mysterious visitant, to a country for which he evinced so deep an interest, he seemed to forbid time's anticipations of his views; and in all things, and upon all occasions, appeared habitually to act as one who thought

"The flighty purpose never is o'ertook,
Unless the deed go with it.”

I

CHAPTER V.

never may believe these antique fables, These fairy toys.

Midsummer's Night's Dream.

But I have cause to pry into this pedant."

Taming of the Shrew.

THE Commodore pursued his solitary way to the peninsula of Dunore with as much rapidity as the nature of his mountainous road would admit. He had enquired the route both from the baccah and the driver; and to their various, and not always accordant instructions, clearly arranged in his memory, he added his own judgment, and such information as he could occasionally glean from the passengers he accidentally met.* These, however, were few;

* In Ireland, it is extremely difficult, to learn either the way or the distance, in performing a

for as he proceeded among the mountains, by roads only passable during the autumn, the population was so scanty, that in the course of many miles, ambled over by his admirable little steed, he met only with three individuals; a boy carrying a couple of chickens for sale to a distant market, a woman with a few hanks of yarn, proceeding to the same rustic emporium, and a priest, bearing the viaticum to a dying penitent, whose temptations to err, amid scenes of such privation, could not have been very

numerous.

The priest courteously joined, and accompanied the lonely traveller on his route; and might have been deemed an acceptable Cicerone, in a region, which, however rude and savage, was not

journey by the cross-roads, or mountain paths. In remote places, it may be literally said, that "the way lengthens as we go," since every one, of whom inquiries are made, adds a mile or two to the original distance.

wholly destitute of something like classic interest. In the dialect and accent of the province, intermingled with a few French and a few Latin words, he pointed out, here a Cromlech, and there a cairne, a Danish fort, or a monastie ruin, and added such scraps of antiquarian tradition, as are to be found, even in the remotest places in Ireland; where the superstition of the people lends implicit faith to all that is marked by miracle, and their national vanity to all that is stamped with antiquity. The legend of St. Olan's cap was repeated, as a distant view was caught of St. Olan's abbey. Its miraculous efficacy, still acknowledged by the peasantry, and the belief of its having returned of itself to the spot from whence it had been removed (though composed of an immense hollow stone), was circumstantially recorded. One of the defile castles of the great Macarthies, called The Fairy's Rock, or Carig-na-Souky, was

pointed out, in the distance, on the summit of a cliff, which hung above the ravine it guarded. The ruins of St. Gobnate's church, rather guessed at than clearly distinguished, introduced the legend of that fair saint, with the episode of the history of the stone cross, still extant among its ruins, where a far-famed rood of the Virgin was once kept, and where still a stone, fixed near it, in the earth, exhibits the impression of many a penitent pilgrim's bended knee. For the rest, the communicative and courteous priest gave the Commodore some excellent instructions as to his future route, and lamented that he had not taken a road, which, though more circuitous by nearly a day's journey, was far less intricate than the one he had chosen. This he asserted to be a bird's flight route from the north to the south of the county, a bridleway or car-track, cut, time immemorial, by the mountaineers, for the purposes

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