By Mrs. MARY LOW DICKINSON.
[Continued.]

An early start from Killarney, and a seven-hour journey by rail, ending in delightful quarters at the pleasant Hotel Shelburne, in Dublin, gives a comfortable sense of having passed an agreeable day.

“I would like to have run from Limerick Junction up to Limerick,” says a feminine member of the quartette.

“I don’t think we missed anything in Limerick; I felt like stopping awhile at Kilkenny,” answered her brother.

“But Kilkenny comes to America,” said the first speaker, who had been reading about the enormous annual emigration from that town.

“Well, I fancy one can have all one wants of Limerick at home.”

“Not all I want,” said the little woman, perversely.

“What can you want, who have had your full share of domestic torments, with numberless Bridgets and Norahs?”

There was no answer, but later, in the privacy of her chamber, she said, “I did so want to go to Limerick, to buy some Irish lace. You know they make it there, and send it over to Brussels, and then it is bought back into Ireland for quadruple its cost”—but the air of mild rebuke with which her companion looked up from the diary in which she was describing the beauties of Killarney scenery, seemed to act as a sudden check upon the purely feminine outburst. “Of course I know we can’t stop to buy things,” she added, apologetically.

“Nor can we buy things when we do stop. It’s dreadful of you to begin to want things so early.”

“Yes,” chimed in a masculine voice at the door, “It’s unworthy the spirit of a true Chautauquan. Get on your hats, girls, there’s time enough for a drive, to get what the books recommend—a general view of the town.”

Our hotel fronts Stephen’s Green, whose twenty acres of beautiful grounds form only one of six such ornamented breathing places for that portion of the city which lies on the right bank of the Liffey, beyond the confines of the ancient town. Our coachman knows his business, and halts to point out the equestrian statue of George the Second, showing through the trees in the center of the square. Then we must look at the old Mansion House, and at the site of the great exposition building which stands in twelve acres of garden, and was, if successful, to have been what the Crystal Palace of Sydenham is to London. Financially, it was not a success, and the future use of the building is not yet decided. We halt again to admire the architectural beauty of “the finest building in Dublin, if not in Ireland,” formerly the Irish House of Parliament and now used as the Bank of Ireland. If it were not too late we could go in and see the whole process of printing the bank notes. As it is, we jog slowly on to the eastern end of College Green, which is entirely occupied by the imposing front of Trinity College. The huge Corinthian pile covers an extent of thirty acres. The income is derived largely from landed estates. Its library of one hundred and thirty thousand volumes grows rapidly, for the University is one of the five that has the right to a copy of every volume published in the United Kingdom. The number of students, usually about two thousand, is diminished somewhat by the new Queen’s University, founded by Victoria in 1850, which grants degrees to the graduates from the Queen’s Colleges at Belfast, Galway, and Cork. To a company of learners, nothing could be more interesting than to visit the museums, observatories, botanic gardens, and printing houses of this great institution, which has had such an influence on education in Ireland; but, if we could not see all, we confess to a preference for a day at the Royal Dublin Society, whose professors lecture to the public gratuitously, and whose schools in the fine arts instruct worthy pupils without charge. We want also to see the male and female training schools, under the charge of the Board of Education, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, and the Drummond Orphanage, owned and supported by a merchant of that name. Other societies for the promotion of science and literature are too numerous to name. No city is more generously provided with the means of education, or produces more learned scholars, yet nowhere is the ignorance of the lowest classes more marked. No place more abounds in charitable institutions. The charity schools number over two hundred, yet the condition of the poor is wretched in the extreme. The city is one of striking contrasts, of grand architectural effects, heightened by the meanness of the dwellings of the poor. The nine bridges over the Liffey add greatly to the picturesqueness of the place, but the water of the stream is as notoriously filthy as ever. Within a few years some efforts have been made to improve the sanitation of the city and the hygienic condition of the poor. Dirty alleys have been widened, model tenements built and drinking fountains supplied. At enormous cost the neighboring streams were turned into a valley, which made a natural reservoir seventeen miles from the city. Thence the water is brought through tunnels to filtering chambers, eight miles from town, from which it is distributed over the city. From the University we went down Dame Street to the Castle, used since the time of Elizabeth as the residence of the Lord Lieutenant. Here there are state apartments to be seen, and music to be heard in the beautiful chapel, but none of this to-day. The sun is setting, and as we whirl on past hospital, postoffice, Custom House, and convents, over the bridge and by the magnificent structure called the Four Courts, because there are held the courts of Queen’s Bench, Common Pleas, Chancery, and Exchequer, there is not time to drive inside the gate of the beautiful Phoenix Park and look at the obelisk that commemorates the victories of Wellington. That must be left for the morrow, as must the old Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, whose ancient archepiscopal palace is now used as barracks for the police. In this cathedral are the tombs of Dean Swift and the Stella of his poetry. The structure is the most remarkable instance of complete restoration of our day, Mr. B. L. Guinness, M. P., having spent £150,000 in its restoration. He was knighted for his generosity, and it does not become us to suggest that the sum could have been better spent.

We shall have to divide into two parties to-morrow, and while the artist and teacher go to examine the picture gallery and the schools, the others will get a look at the docks and the harbor, where, by aid of dredging machines, the sand is kept at bay, so that ships can now come up to the quays. Commerce still continues to be important, as Dublin is the avenue of supply for imports for the midland district, but manufacturers of woollen, cotton, silk, etc., are nearly extinct, though the general financial and commercial condition of Ireland is improved within the last twenty years.

While Dublin has declined, especially in manufactures of linen and flax, Belfast, the metropolis of the north of Ireland, has steadily grown in both. It lies on our route to the north, five hours from London. It offers nothing in the common lines of interest, such as churches, museums, public buildings, and parks that would induce a stay; but its immense manufactories are well worth any loss of time a visit may involve. We were shown all through the largest steam-mill, which employs nearly three thousand men; and through the immense establishment at Ardoyne, where the finest linen—that intended for the noblest houses, whose coats of arms are woven in the web—is made by hand. It was interesting indeed, to see, as in the former mill, the process from the beginning with the raw flax to the beautiful completed fabric, and more interesting to watch the workers, many of them women, young girls and little children, who live their lives out day after day in the dust and din of machinery. Their pinched and haggard faces, their dull, spiritless eyes, and the constant monotonous motion of their hands made them seem a part of the machines, and brought to mind with great force Mrs. Browning’s “Cry of the Children.”

Belfast is a great, comfortable, well-to-do looking city, with wide, well-paved streets, many attractive public buildings and substantial homes. We stopped but a night, taking train to Portrush, via the cozy little town of Coleraine. It is a journey of about seventy miles, leaving daylight enough to direct to the picturesque castle of Dunluce, which stands on an isolated rock a hundred feet above the sea. The bridge from the mainland is so narrow as to incline all four of us, like children, “to take hold of hands.” It is a wild spot, with many romantic associations, if the head did not swim, gazing down into the boiling waves that have worn great caves under the walls, so that we could not stay to hear. We creep back, cautiously as we came, to our car, a regular bouncing, swaying, Irish jaunting car, and are whirled on four or five miles further, to see the one thing for which we are up here on this wild Irish shore—the famous Giant’s Causeway. This great natural curiosity has been so often described, that it is already familiar. Its prismatic columns of stone, rising a thousand feet from the sea, make a promontory of pillars, each fitted so perfectly to its neighbor that we can not at first recognize the structure as a freak of nature. As we look over the whole field, it is strangely impressive, and reminds one of the towers, tombs, spires, and strange shapes taken at Vesuvius by the fields of lava, and the mind takes kindly to the wild legends, and does not disturb itself with the various scientific theories concerning the formation. The legends say that the giant was Fin M’Coul, who built the causeway quite across the channel to Scotland, in order to meet in fair fight a boasting Caledonian giant. The giant well whipped, and the causeway, no longer needed, Fin allowed it to fall into the sea. It is a pity to hasten here, for the wild picturesqueness of the spot grows with every hour of wandering upon the rocks, but we must back to Coleraine, and thence to Londonderry, where, tired and sleepy, we hide ourselves away in our cabins on the little steamer, and are carried in our sleep over the channel to Scotland, breakfasting cozily in McLean’s old-fashioned, quiet hotel in Glasgow.

And now we are in another world. Here is no lack of pure water, for Loch Katrine, thirty miles away, pours into the city no less than twenty-four millions of gallons a day. Here is thrift, for around us is a city whose trade so increased that its import duties multiplied a thousand times in sixty years. Here is the beautiful Clyde, literally lined with ships, old and new, ships going and coming, ships in every stage from hulk and beams to paint. Here is a city alive with honest work, with staunch and loyal principles, with churches and schools of the best. Her cathedral ranks next in the kingdom to Westminster Abbey. Among her philanthropies, one of the latest is specially worthy of mention. It is an immense depot, with many branches, for furnishing food to the working classes. They can have a good substantial breakfast for six cents; a dinner of soup, meat, potatoes and pudding, for about nine cents. The originator of this work is Mr. Thomas Corbett, who should find imitators in every city in the world. Is not this a better work than to scrape a cathedral inch by inch from base to tower?

With so much that is living and practical to interest, strange that we hurry away to that which is a matter of poetic sentiment and association with the dead. Yet there are, even in our quartette, those who cheerfully turn from the living pictures of Scotch prosperity, to go and dream for a day on the bridges and in the shadow of the old Wallace tower of Ayr. They want to stroll out to the cottage where Robbie Burns was born, to visit the “auld kirk-yard,” to grow sentimental, perhaps, over his snuff-box, and to touch the Bible he gave his Highland Mary. Well, if they will go, we might as well go along, for, leaving out the poetry and the poet, what can be lovelier than to be out of doors in this early September weather in one of the most picturesque parts of Scotland! The excursion takes only one day from Glasgow, and when we are safely back, we are only two hours by rail from Edinburgh.

And here, as we throw wide open the shutters of front rooms in the old Hotel Royal, and look out upon the deep ravine that divides the city, and across to the castle-crowned hills, and down upon the monument of Walter Scott, just over the way, our cool and quiet ones become eagerly enthusiastic, and the enthusiasts grow wild. We are sure we want to stay here a month; we want to fly out to the nearest circulating library and get all of Scott’s novels at once; we want to hurry our dinner, that we may go and explore this wonderful and picturesque old place.

The girl whose outcropping desire to buy things was unanimously nipped in the bud, ventures to say she “must have a plaid—a shawl, a necktie, something, anything, that is plaid,” and receives no unsympathetic reply. For the moment, struggling Ireland’s forgotten, and all that is not purely American in us, is altogether and unanimously Scotch. In this mood we are not slow in finding our way to the streets, believing that acquaintance with details will enhance our first impression of the imposing picturesqueness of the place. Our starting point is the foot of Sir Walter’s marble monument, which rises slender and graceful two hundred feet in air. The statues in the niches represent characters in his books, the “Lady of the Lake,” the “Last Minstrel,” and “Meg Merrilies,” breaking the sapling over Lucy Bertram’s head. We had thought to pass by Abbotsford, having indulged ourselves with Ayr, but here we find the question recurring, “Can not we take the time on the way to London to see the home, especially the study, of Scott—to go to Dryburgh Abbey and stand beside his grave; and on the same excursion see the Abbey of Melrose?” Forced to leave the question unanswered, but secretly resolving to do it, we go as straight as we can, asking many questions of the guide by the way, to the Castle of Edinburgh, which frowns down from the precipice on which it stands with a grim aspect ill-suited to the present time.

The esplanade or parade ground of the castle covers about six acres. Over the drawbridge, between the low protecting batteries, along the ramparts we pass to the strong gate that gives us admission to the inner fort, which contains the older portions of the castle. In this pile of buildings on the east side are, what we more specially came to see, the state apartments of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the wall down which her infant son was lowered in a basket. Here, too, we see the crown-room containing the regalia of Scotland, the crown, scepter, and sword of state, and the lord-treasurer’s rod of office. From the ramparts we are shown northward the magnificent view of the new town, while to the east lies the old town, backed by Arthur’s Seat. The line of street eastward from the castle to Holyrood House, contains many of Edinburgh’s most prominent buildings, both new and old. Near the foot of the hill is the new Assembly Hall, the meeting place of the General Assembly of the Established Church of Scotland, and near it the Church Normal Schools and the extensive buildings of the Free Church College, and the Parliament House, whose carved, oaken-roofed hall—the Westminster Hall of Edinburgh—was used by the Parliament before the union with England. Near at hand is the old Cathedral of St. Giles, whose space after the Reformation was divided into four churches, in one of which John Knox was wont to preach. We pass near his house also, and approach the memorial of Scotland’s ancient splendor, the ancient palace and abbey of Holyrood. The ruins of the chapel where Mary Stuart was married to Darnley, and where King Charles the First was crowned, lie behind the present structure, which was rebuilt after the destruction of the old palace by Cromwell. The spot abounds in historical associations. It was a most powerful institution as an abbey, the abbot holding regular court like other barons: as a royal refuge it sheltered Charles the Tenth of France during the Revolution, and as a residence has received at times nearly all the crowned heads of England, not excepting Queen Victoria, who sometimes stops here en route to Balmoral, and who held a levee here in 1842. Yet of all its associations, that with Mary Stuart is the one most familiar, and perhaps most painfully interesting to the stranger. Here are the rooms she last occupied, her bed-chamber remaining as she left it, here the cabinet where Rizzio was murdered. These apartments are in the northwest corner, and the oldest portion of the present quadrangular building.

But, interesting as is all that is connected with a historic or tragic past, we must not overlook the city of to-day. Records of what Edinburgh has been, as found in ruins, in buildings, in monuments, in books, would require a volume, and records of her present condition, another. We can only glance at a few of the more marked evidences of her material advancement. Formerly she accommodated her growing population by building higher and higher in the air, but more recently they have filled up the ravine and extended in every direction on the ground. Her population increases, though not with the rapidity of Glasgow, for she has no great trade or manufacture to attract the rural districts. The women exceed the men by some twenty thousand. Her moral condition has been of the best, her sanitary condition unfortunately of the worst, but great improvements have been made in drainage and in destruction of dilapidated dwellings, ventilation of unhealthy courts, and especially in cleansing of the streets. In this latter particular Edinburgh is better cared for then any other large town in the kingdom. While the city has been, like the rest of the world, wofully behind in caring for the bodies of the healthful, her numerous hospitals, public and private, testify her kindness to the ill. Nothing of prevention and everything in the way of cure seems to be the motto of modern philanthropy. Churches for souls, university, colleges, every type of school, free and charitable, for the brain; all stress laid upon what the people believe, what they learn, what they do, and what they wear, combined with utter disregard of what they breathe or what they eat. There is no disregard of what they drink, however, even in this western Athens, for Edinburgh can boast larger breweries than any other place in the world. But then she boasts larger printing houses and more of them than almost any other. Printing is indeed her principal craft; scholarship flourishes; learning is reckoned at its true value; philanthropy is active and earnest, and the city abounds in monuments of all; there is an air of vigorous heartiness in the people that is tonic in its effect, like the feel of a country morning with the first crisp frost in the air.

From Edinburgh to London we take the Great Western Railway, one of the best managed in the kingdom. Already we have learned that we have no more “baggage,” and how to “own our luggage;” that there are no cars in this country, but carriages, and “luggage vans.” The man who locks us in our own compartment is not a conductor, but a “guard;” we hear nothing of railroads, but a good deal of “ways” and trains. After days of steady running hither and thither, to see this, to hear that, to learn the other, it is agreeable to lean back and doze and dream while the swift train bears us away from the highlands and the heather. We sleep in England at the quaint old Roman town of Chester, and take time enough in the morning to visit the cathedral, walk through the queer streets where the covered sidewalk for foot passengers is on the roofs, and the carriage-way is sunken several feet below the level of the road. Anxious as we were to reach London, we could not resist stopping at Warwick for a couple of days, resting at the Old Warwick Arms, and crowding every hour with a living interest hardly to be aroused in any other part of England. For from this point a drive of eight miles through a charming country takes us to Stratford-on-Avon, and to the oft-described home and tomb of Shakspere. This is almost always a white day in the tourist’s memory, for, through all the delightful drive, at the house of Shakspere, in the room where he was born, by the desk at which he sat at school, in the cottage of Ann Hathaway, and by his tomb in the church, one feels in a new world. A crowd of visitors may throng the cottage and the house, and one hears all sorts of chatter, but they and we and all modern folk seem strange and out of place. And I doubt not many minds have found it hard to associate the place with Shakspere at all. It doesn’t suit our idea of the man or his work, and it is hard to dispossess the mind of the idea that we are lending ourselves to a little farce.

We drive slowly back along the Avon at sunset, and give a second day to Warwick Castle and a drive to the ruins of Kenilworth. In the former we have the best representation of an old English castle that we shall see; one all the more impressive because it is the first seen; in the latter the grandest ruin that England can show. Both have many historical associations, but we have not yet escaped from the dominion of Scott, and have just re-read his “Kenilworth,” and naturally look for traces of Queen Bess, and of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose tomb is in the Church of St. Mary in Warwick. So we sit down under the ivy-crowned battlements, and listen while one reads aloud the account of the five days of entertainment that Leicester gave the Queen, and imagination peoples the ruined banquet hall with the knights and ladies fair who made the place so gay.

Yet, strange to say, such dreams fade as we drive home to dinner, and find us quite ready, after a refreshing sleep in the queerest and quaintest of all English inns, to depart for classic Oxford, which lies direct upon our London route. Time was when no more venerable and imposing architectural effect could be found in all Europe than that produced by the groups of buildings along the main street of Oxford, belonging to the twenty colleges that make the University. But, in these latter days, so many of the colleges have been remodeled, or restored, that the air of venerable antiquity is entirely lost. Outside the college buildings, new hotels, a town hall, savings banks, a corn exchange, and other mercantile structures materially alter the effect of the place, which owed its character formerly to the University alone. Among the colleges themselves, University and Exeter have new chapels, Jesus College a new Gothic front, Merton’s Library has been remodeled, and the old gate-house of Brasennose restored. The new buildings, given at a cost of thirty thousand pounds, by Miss Brackenbury, the daughter of an old scholar, are very fine, and the new Gothic building, called the Union Debating and Reading Room, decorated in part by Rossetti, from the legends of King Arthur, is a great ornament to the group. The new Keble College, in memory of the author of “The Christian Year,” is near the University Museum, which is the principal addition to the group of buildings, which we can not mention in detail. As the most important of all institutions of learning, Oxford University must have an interest for every lover of knowledge. Its origin is not certainly known. Its government is by statutes, originating with the University authorities, and confirmed by the kings of England. Its chancellor was formerly an ecclesiastic, and chosen for three years; now he is chosen for life, and from among nobles of distinction who have been members of the University. Its professors are paid partly by the crown, partly from the University chest, and partly from estates left for this purpose. Both Oxford and Cambridge have the privilege of choosing two representatives in Parliament. There is no end to what may be seen and learned if the traveler can linger a few weeks just here. In that event, leave the hotel, which is very luxurious, but very dear, and take lodgings in some one of the many comfortable houses, kept for that purpose, within easy walking distance of the libraries and museums. There is only one danger, and that is, that the longer one stays the longer one wishes to stay, and if we should linger to see one moiety of what we might enjoy, our trip to London would be indefinitely deferred. So we decide against the lodging, and take instead—the train.

The one blessed thing about London, especially to travelers who have rushed through miles of country and crowded the sight with constantly varying scenes, is that it can not be seen in a day. We might as well try to eat a life-time’s Thanksgiving banquet at once, or to grow from youth to age in a night. London is of all places in the world the one to stay in, and we have come to stay. Not at any so-called American boarding-house, not even at the great caravansary in Portland Place, or down by the Alexandra Gate, but in our own hired house. A wee place, not far from St. James in Piccadilly, whose master was once upon a time head butler to lord somebody or other, and whose mistress was the maid to my lady. And butler and maid saved their wages and were wed, and now there they are living in the basement of this their home, he to wait at table, with an air that makes our masculine friends feel, as if he were saying, “Yes, my lord,” and “No, my lord;” and she to keep all tidy and bright in our tiny parlor and dining room, and the bedrooms above. Here we can rest until the home letters are written and the books read, and we are ready to attack the great city with real zest, happy in the thought of what it has in store. Our life will cost us half what it would at the great hotels, where we should meet only the American life we know so well. English life we can see only in the streets, in church, in making purchases, in books, and in its out of door public aspects, unless we are indeed so fortunate as to have brought letters that shall open English homes. Then, indeed, we come to know England and the English in a way to appreciate its best, and to estimate justly what seem to us some of its worst characteristics.

To its social life, of any class whatever, introductions are the only key. To its political movements the ordinary tourist has little access beyond what the newspapers give, and that he may have at home. To be an eye-witness of momentous events or of the circumstances that shape a nation’s destinies is hardly to be hoped. Her history lies all about in monuments, and ruins, and palaces, and institutions, volumes in changeless stone. Her general conditions of prosperity, commercial and other, may be guessed from what one sees, and, reading backward from effect to cause, the thoughtful observer may determine something of individual and national character. Something comes to him by intuition, something by observation, and slowly, by ways he knows and ways he knows not, he feels that he is coming to a knowledge of England, of English people, and English life. London of all places seems the spot to bide. He haunts her galleries and walks her streets, and dreams in her abbey, and sits in her churches, and finds he is claiming her history as his own. If Americans must live anywhere out of America, London, with its teeming varied interests, its thousand worlds in one, is the place for him to live. What sights he will see there, what things he will do there, everybody knows. Let art, or literature, or commerce, or religion, or science be his hobby, he will find companions enough and to spare. There is room for everything in London, notwithstanding it is the most crowded place under the sun; room even for us who, while jogging along together, yet have each cast our nets in separate streams. What we shall gather, who can tell?

[To be continued.]