"WILLIAM AND MART.

135

commodious vessel. But many persons, made bold by the chap.excess of fear, and choosing rather to trust the winds and wavesthan the exasperated Irishry, ventured to encounter all thedangers of Saint George’s Channel and of the Welsh coast inopen boats and in the depth of winter. The English whoremained began, in almost every county, to draw close together.

Every large country house became a fortress. Every visitorwho arrived after nightfall was challenged from a loophole orfrom a barricaded window; and, if he attempted to enterwithout pass words and explanations, a blunderbuss was pre-sented to him. On the dreaded night of the ninth of December,there was scarcely one Protestant mansion from the Giant’sCauseway to Bantry Bay in which armed men were not watchingand lights burning from the early sunset to the late sunrise. *

A minute account of what passed in one district at this time nistoryof

x the town

has come down to us, and well illustrates the general state of of kch-the kingdom. The south-western part of Kerry is now wellknown as the most beautiful tract in the British isles. Themountains, the glens, the capes stretching far into the Atlantic,the crags on which the eagles build, the rivulets brawling downrocky passes, the lakes overhung by groves in which the wilddeer find covert, attract every summer crowds of wandererssated with the business and the pleasures of great cities. Thebeauties of that country are indeed too often hidden in the mistand rain which the west wind brings up from a boundless ocean.

But, on the rare days when the sun shines out in all his glory,the landscape has a freshness and a warmth of colouring seldomfound in our latitude. The myrtle loves the soil. The arbutusthrives better than even on the sunny shore of Calabria.** Theturf is of livelier hue than elsewhere: the hills glow with a* True and Impartial Account, 1G89; Leslie’s Answer to King, 1C92.

** There have been in the neighbourhood of Killarney specimens of thearbutus thirty feet high and four feet and a half round. See the Philosophi-cal Transactions, 227.