The train will take you to Kenmare, where the railway company has a really comfortable hotel, in whose garden you will see the characteristic subtropical vegetation which can be produced in this climate—palms, yuccas, New Zealand flax with its sword-shaped fronds, bamboos, and the rest, "all standing naked in the open air" like the heathen goddesses in the Groves of Blarney. From Kenmare the beautifully engineered road, which was a joy to man and beast till heavy motor coaches began to destroy it, runs along the north shore of the sea lough and a few miles out crosses the Kerry Blackwater by the most picturesque bridge over the loveliest stream that anyone could ever hope to throw a fly in. A little farther along is Parknasilla, the big hotel which has been built at a point where the coast breaks up into a number of wooded islets, with bridges connecting them, and meandering walks—well, nothing could be prettier. Then you go along through Sneem, getting into opener, wilder country. As you approach West Cove, Staigue Fort is on your right, a great circular structure of dry masonry, more developed than the similar buildings in Aran, for it has chambers in the thickness of the wall and stairs leading to platforms for defence. From this monument of prehistoric times, whose date can be measured by thousands of years, look across to your left, where another stone building is in progress—a large hospital designed to benefit the poor folk of this district: the bounty of a lady belonging to one of the families who profited by confiscation and for too long drew absentee rents. What may be the success of the scheme cannot be foretold: but the beauty of her desire to make restitution is not the least among the beauties of the Kenmare River.

At West Cove I have been lucky enough to stay with the man who knows the west of Ireland in its present life and its past history better perhaps than any living soul. In the great plot where cars draw up outside his door, great plants of Arum lilies shoot up and flourish, blooming luxuriantly in spring. They say that in Valentia an improving gardener thought them too profuse in the Knight of Kerry's garden, and pitched the roots out over the cliffs; but some caught on ledges, fastened there, and sent up white lilies in niches of the crags—so kind is that soft air.

Two or three miles beyond West Cove is the village of Caherdaniel and under it comes in Darrynane Bay, on whose shore is a little hotel, simple enough, but friendly; lying among Irish fisher folk who gather of a summer evening to dance on the crisp turf that covers the sand. Beside it is a small wood, and in the wood is Darrynane, a place of pilgrimage, for here O'Connell lived and here his descendants remain. The case of the O'Connells was typical. Driven by Cromwell out of the fertile lands of Limerick they took root among the mountains of Kerry and of Clare. The builder of Darrynane—that is of the original habitation—was a Daniel or Donal who married a daughter of the O'Donoghues—another great Kerry clan. This lady—MÁire Dubh—was a fruitful mother of children—she bore twenty-two of them and brought twelve to full age; but she was also notable as a poetess in the Irish tongue. Her second son, Maurice, inherited Darrynane, and was known all over the country as Hunting Cap O'Connell, for a tax was put on beaver hats, and from that day he wore nothing but the velvet cap in which he was used to hunt hare and fox on the mountains of Iveragh. Daniel O'Connell, his nephew, was a great votary of that sport, and I have talked with a man who had hunted in his company. And still in autumn you may see the harriers out on these hills and a namesake and descendant of his hallooing them on.

Old Hunting Cap as head of the family played a great part in his nephew's youth, providing, it would seem, for the later stages of his education. The early one was cheap enough, for he was fostered on the mountains in the cabin of his father's herd (that tie of fosterage bound Catholic Ireland together, gentle and simple, with a strange intimacy), and he got his first lessons in one of the hedge schools which flourished in defiance of penal laws. It was no less typical of Catholic Ireland that he should go abroad to finish his training, or that he should have a kinsman high placed in the service of France. His father's younger brother, Count O'Connell, was the last colonel of the Irish Brigade: and when he was consulted concerning a place to send his nephews, in 1790, found himself much perplexed to answer, so troubled was the state of all the Continent. Daniel and his brother Maurice were sent first to the Jesuits at St. Omer; they were trained to detest the revolution which was driving their uncle out of the service of France: and soon the flood of turmoil drove them from Douay whither they had moved. At Calais, they learnt the news of Louis XVI's execution: on the boat were two passengers who spoke of it as willing eyewitnesses. These men were Irish Protestants, the brothers Sheares, afterwards executed for conspiracy. It is very notable that although Protestant Ireland, especially in Ulster, was much affected by the revolutionary and republican doctrines, these found very little echo in the Catholic part of the nation—and none at all among survivors of the old Catholic gentry, such as the O'Connells. Yet when the young O'Connell settled down to read for the bar in London, harsh measures of repression and the violent Toryism of that day soon drove him into revolt. He had a genuine hatred of oppression, of unfair play: later in life this devoutest of Roman Catholics was the most powerful advocate of equality for the Jews.

However, this is no place to talk of the great orator's career or his triumphs. To his own folk in Kerry he was always "the Counsellor", the wonderful advocate whose genius was like a flaming sword drawn for the terrified prisoner. No other Irish leader has ever been so near akin to the common folk; it was not for nothing he suckled the breast of a Kerry peasant, and learnt to speak his first words in the Irish tongue. Yet, oddly enough and pathetically enough, so little of a "nationalist" in our modern sense was he, that he welcomed and encouraged the growing disuse of Irish speech; all diversity of tongues seemed hateful to him, in his eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism. But no man was ever more in love with Ireland, or more devoted to one spot of earth than he to his Darrynane. He wrote to Walter Savage Landor of himself that he "was born within the sound of the everlasting wave", and that his "dreamy boyhood fed its fancies upon the ancient and long-faded glories of that land which preserved Christianity when the rest of now civilized Europe was shrouded in the darkness of godless ignorance".

That was how O'Connell thought of Kerry; and as you drive on from Caherdaniel along the high pass of Coomakista, which brings you out across a shoulder of mountain from the view across Kenmare River to a wider outlook full west on the Atlantic—why, you will have some inkling of the sublimity which he felt.

Below you is the little harbour to and from which the O'Connells worked their smuggling craft; and you can discern a narrow cleft in the rocks making a short cut for row boats on a calm day. Once, they say, a sloop of the smugglers lay in the harbour and was suddenly aware of a revenue brig rounding the headland from the south. The wind blew into the harbour. It was impossible to escape, and the sloop lay motionless and to all appearance idle. But just as the pursuer tacked and ran straight into the harbour mouth a sail was hoisted on the sloop, she began to move, and in a minute her sides were scraping through the tiny passage, while men with sweeps out fended her off this and that sunken rock; and in another minute she was out and away, cracking on full sail with a good half-hour's lead before the revenue boat could beat out of the narrow sound to chase her.

From Coomakista the road descends steeply to Waterville, a famous place for anglers, where a new town has grown up about the outlet to Lough Currane, for here is now the chief station of the transatlantic cables. The first of these cables was laid from Valentia Island some ten miles farther north opposite the town of Cahirciveen, which will be your destination if you purpose to return by rail along the shore of Dingle Bay. But I commend to all, motorist, cyclist, or foot traveller (if such a one be left in these degenerate days), another way of exploring Iveragh. Also, if the sea is not your enemy, it is worth while to stay in Waterville—where the sea as well as the lake offer great chance to fishers—and try an expedition to the Skellig Rocks. Fine weather is needed, for there is difficulty in landing on these astonishing places where the gannets are the chief habitants: strong flyers, they nest nowhere between this point and the Bass Rock in Scotland, yet you may see them by dozens anywhere along the west coast even in the breeding season. On the Skelligs are old stone stairs of tremendous height, the work of old-time anchorite monks who established themselves here in stone beehive-shaped cells—still intact, for you to wonder at the discomforts of piety. And in the crevices of these rocks rare birds breed—the stormy petrel, the Manx shearwater, along with legions of puffin, guillemot, razorbill, shag, and the rest. But do not go there even with a light easterly wind, for it blows direct on to the rocky landing place; and if it blows at all from the south-west the swell may be too big even on the sheltered side. Nature is on a big scale, a rough playfellow, out here in the Atlantic.

Even landward from Lough Currane, it is a wild nature that you must encounter on the old mountain road to Killarney, which you should travel for choice.

This way follows up the valley of the Eany River (but you may take the main road skirting Lough Currane and turn in west to this same valley at Owroe bridge) to the pass of Bealach Oisin (Ossian's Track) between Coolee and Knocknagapple. At the crest one must be close on a thousand feet up, and the view back over Ballinskelligs bay with the Atlantic beyond, to which the eye is led by a long winding thread of river between steep mountain sides, is a splendid prospect. Once over the neck, sea, river, and tilled land all disappear: nothing is seen but heath and rock and mountain. On the right is the high ridge which makes the backbone of Iveragh: in front of you the Reeks fill the eastern sky. Not a house can be seen—and there are very few places in Ireland (so thickly scattered are people over the poorest land) from which human habitation cannot be discerned.

A few miles down brings you into the valley of the Caragh river which flows out from Loughs Reagh and Cloon and after a course of some ten miles enters the long and deep Caragh Lake, whence another short run brings it to the sea. This is the valley which lies west of the Reeks, and, for my own part, I count this aspect of them finer than anything you will see at Killarney. There is a big, new hotel at the outfall of Caragh Lake on the railway, much frequented now: but all my time among these hills and waters has been given to a little oldfashioned anglers' inn, the Glencar hotel, on the reach of river between Bealalaw bridge and Lickeen rapids. Here you may fish for salmon at a nominal charge in one of the best waters in Ireland: on the evening when I got there this summer, they were jumping everywhere in the beautiful Long Range pool where the little Caragh joins the main stream; red, ugly fish, it must be owned, for this was in September and they had lain there since June without a fresh to move them—but still there were salmon and plenty of them. Or you can fish free of charge at Lough Acoose at the headwaters of Caraghbeg, in under the flank of Carrantuohil, with better prospect of a full basket than anywhere else known to me. The trout are not big anywhere in Kerry, but in Acoose they run to a good herring size, and the man who fished it the day when I was at Glencar got something over two dozen—a usual bag. My companion and I had gone farther afield, to the headwaters of Caragh itself, right up into the great ring of mountains through which the pass of Bealachbeama lets you out to the Kenmare side. Little need be said about our fishing, which was interrupted by the fact that our boat, leaking like a sieve, finally foundered while we were trying to get her ashore—a new boat too, wanting nothing but a couple of good coats of paint. Yet the chance which drove us off Cloon, while the boat was being got ashore and emptied, sent us up across a mile of bog to fish the upper lake from the shore; and what a lake! lying right in under the steep side of a mountain almost precipitous, where the eagles built till a year or two back, and for three parts of its circumference ringed about like the crater of a volcano.

It was a day of dry wind, northerly to north-easterly, and of hard lights: one lacked the magical enchantment of westerly air over the whole: yet for sheer grandeur I do not know that all my wanderings after fish in Ireland have ever taken me to so fine a scene.

That little hotel, primitive in its equipment but most friendly, has its attractions to offer all the year round, for the salmon fishing begins in earnest in February, and through the winter months there is rough shooting (grouse, cock, and snipe), to be had over the great expanses of heather and those broad belts of native wooding which grow about the river in its lower course. From the hotel down to the lake your path lies between this scrub of oak and holly and birch and a water, swift yet deep, where pool succeeds pool, each divided from the next only by strong rapids. You have no monopoly there: the river is fished from both banks and can be covered right across, though it needs a good man to do it; but it is practically a free fishing and the best free river fishing that I know in Ireland—absolutely an ideal spot for the holiday-maker who does not insist on being near the sea. You can walk from it all the finest mountains in Kerry since it lies in the very centre: and away west of you is Glenbeigh, another valley where decent quarters can be had amid landscape of the same type. Of the same type—but I cannot believe that anywhere in Kerry or out of it you will match the journey which convoyed me from Glencar to my next stage at the Caragh Lake hotel. It was inland scenery no doubt, but the breath and the feeling of the sea is over all this neck of sea-washed Iveragh, and that river valley seemed no more than an avenue through the hills leading to the gateway of ocean. We walked along the river bank, often shoulder high in fern, often stopping to pull the blackberry clusters, and we studied the pools set in, here among trees, there with open sward on both sides and moor stretching away behind. Below the rapids we took boat, and for a mile or more rowed through level bogland, with groups of Scotch fir, purple stemmed in the afternoon light, rising from the river bank. Between their trunks, or in the open gaps, we could see the peaked mass of Carrantuohil, rising in the south-east, the light on its high ridges, but the valleys and chasms on its sides deep in shadow. As we neared the lake the flat land broadened, and from across it came the aromatic, pungent smell of bog myrtle, distinct as the scent from a beanfield, but strong and tonic as brine. Then for an hour and half we paddled down the lake between mountain and mountain, winding round promontory after promontory into sight of reach after reach of the lake. Finally as we entered the wide northern stretch—for our course was due north—all the shore was seen divided into demesnes, big and little, each with its own wooding. The hotel lies farthest of all towards the river's outflow in the north-west, and whoever chose that site deserves credit, for across the wide shining water rise the whole ring of mountains—Carrantuohil away to the south-east, and all the other heights that close in the valley behind Cloon Lake and Bealachbeama spreading fan-wise across the horizon as you look out from the pleasant terrace where palm and hydrangea grow. It is not so finished, not so exquisite, as Killarney; but I should rather choose it for a holiday. I sat on the terrace for an hour that Sunday and watched the sunlight fade off Carrantuohil: all was green and olive when we sat down, for it was a coldish evening and the air northerly; but cloud lay on the peaks, or rather caught the peaks intermittently as it drifted in wreaths across, so that at no time was the whole mountain visible. But gradually as the sun sank these wreaths became touched with a rosy glow, and below them what had been olive-green took on deep tints of coppery purple, rich and glowing, the purple gaining as the rose deepened on the cloud wreath; and higher and higher the shaft of light struck, reaching now only the very topmost pinnacles, till finally it faded out, and all lay before as in a sombre stillness waiting for the fall of night.

Nothing that I carry away from Killarney haunts me with the same fullness of beauty, but perhaps only because Killarney is no one's discovery; it has no secret lover. You might as well seek to praise Sarah Bernhardt's genius or Tennyson's charm of style. Yet I suppose each one will discern for himself some passing perfection, some special facet of that loveliness—as I indeed remember the wonderful, shadowed, lucid green of water reflecting darkly the bank of tall reeds which grow westward of the landing stage to which we rowed in after fishing: and remember, too, the singular sight of a man's naked body, as he stood poised before plunging in to bathe, some hundred yards from us; for the low sun caught his figure, outlined against the long line of dark foliage behind him, and made it at once the glowing centre of a beautiful landscape.

This was on the lower lake, largest by far of the three which form a crescent, compassing from south to north (as the water runs) the eastern flank of the Reeks.

My last visit found me at the Victoria Hotel where the lake is broad and open to the Purple Mountain, a noble landscape: but to reach what is my idea of Killarney proper, you must row across to the narrows between the lovely isle of Inisfallen and the east shore, so reaching Ross Bay and a more confined water, studded over with island rocks. Here the shores are of that peculiar limestone which the lapping of water frets into numberless quaint crannies and fissures till the verge of the water looks as though it were a frame intricately carved by some patient craftsman; and in all these chinks and crevices ferns and other wild and beautiful herbage grow with exquisite profusion. That is what makes to my mind the essence of Killarney's charm, this wealth of intricate detail making a foreground to mountain and lake scenery as bold and wild as any highlands can show. Add to this the presence of unfamiliar foliage, here native, exotic everywhere else—notably the arbutus with its dark, glossy leaf and ruddy stem, handsomest of all shrubs; dark yew also, and juniper, mingled in with native growth of oak and birch, yet through all, skilful plantation has set in this and that graceful foreign tree, this and that bright berry. It is no wonder that such a place should have become one of the world's great tourist centres, especially when to these beauties are added the distinction and interest of fine ruins—Ross Castle where the O'Donoghues were lords till Cromwell's forces drove them out; Inisfallen where St. Finian's pious monks had their abbey through untroubled centuries. And, being as it is, Killarney is equipped for the tourist as is no other place in Ireland: all the excursions have been thought and planned, and your hotelkeeper will have arrangements fully made; nor is the plague of beggars at all the annoyance that it used to be—a blessed reform. The boatmen have learnt their trade of cicerone to perfection, and will not only tell you the standard yarns and jests and legends of the place if you desire them, but will have the tact to discriminate serious-minded folk—such as anglers—who may probably not want this form of entertainment.

Yet, for all that, it is a place for tourists, and, as such, commands only my reluctant tribute. But the drive from Killarney to Kenmare which, skirting Muckross and the upper lake, carries you gradually circling round the whole crescent till you rise into the Black Valley where the Gap of Dunloe breaks in—well, that drive, I must say, fairly broke down my coldness: I grew no less enthusiastic than the famous Scottish expert on salmon fishing who was of the party and declared the whole thing equal to the Trossachs—from which I gather that Scotland at least has not anything to show more fair. Moreover, fishing on the lakes is free and good; there is a chance of salmon, and trout are both plenty and sizeable. That is to say, on a good day they should average close on half a pound, and this means that a pound fish is no great rarity—as he certainly would be in Glencar. Also in Killarney town you have the best fly tier in Ireland; many a friend of mine in Donegal who never saw Kerry could swear to Mr. Courtney's work in this delicate craft, almost an art in itself.

But that is all I have to say about "Heaven's reflex, Killarney".