I shall assume that from Dundalk and its neighbouring beauty, that narrow lough winding among the hills, you go straight to Belfast, with the glorious range of Mourne Mountains on your right hand to make the journey attractive. At "Portadown upon the Bann", where the Pope has a bad name, you are not far from the focus of the industrial north—at all events of the great linen industry. From the train you will see fields white as snow with bleaching webs; and it is said that one cause of this trade's localization is a special suitability of climate, like that which makes Lancashire head of the world for cotton-spinning. Belgium can beat Ireland in producing flax—can get 50 per cent more for the same weight of finished fibre—but in the spinning and weaving Ulster is unapproachable. Unhappily, as in all textile trades, the individual withers and the machine grows more and more: hand-loom damask weavers, who can still make a product marvellous for craftsmanship, find their occupation gone—the machine runs them too close.

What the linen trade has been worth to Ulster can never be counted. It was the one industry which England's jealousy spared, and even (after long refusal) grudgingly fostered, in those very decades when her manufacturers were urging Parliament to stamp out and destroy the woollen trade. Its existence preserved in this corner of the country that industrial habit which means not only an inherited skill but the transmitted aptitude for factory work, with its regular hours and mechanical routine, so unlike the conditions of labour on the land, in which all the rest of Ireland has found—since 1800—its only resource.

Even agriculture has been helped by the proximity of towns where all, down to the labouring classes, have money to buy with. The district which centres about Portadown is to-day foremost of all Ireland for the culture of fruit and flowers, though neither climate nor soil specially favours it. One beauty that Ulster has far more generally than any other province is the flower-bordered cottage. They grow orange lilies in fine profusion, but they grow other and less emblematic blossoms as well.

Belfast—when you reach it—is not calculated to charm the eye. It has the features of any English manufacturing town so far as its buildings are concerned, and the finest structures it can show (without disparaging its handsome Town Hall) are the vast fabrics which rise in the dockyards, such ships as have never been built in the world before—marvels of symmetry and strength. To see them in the building up is to watch, perhaps, the most impressive exhibition of human skill and energy. Ireland, for all its defective development, can boast of heading the world in certain enterprises: Guinness's brewery, Harland and Wolff's engineering works, and Barbour's great net and rope factory at Lisburn are, each in its kind, the biggest and best in Europe, or out of it.

Once you get down to the water in Belfast, beauty is abundant, and for my part I like best the view from the docks. But Mr. Williams has chosen a distant indication of the town under the bold headland, at whose foot it lies so well. This aspect of Cave Hill does not show its strange feature—the vast Napoleonic profile flung up against an eastern sky. Time was when Belfast must have been curiously divided about that portent; for in the Revolution period northern Ireland was fiercely republican. It was on Cave Hill that Wolfe Tone, most formidable of all Irish rebels, with a group of young Ulster democrats, founded the Society of United Irishmen.

Belfast does not dwell much on these memories to-day, nor indeed on any memories; her interest is in the prosperous present, the growing future. And although it has its absurdities, notably in the claim to be more populous than Dublin (a result achieved by omitting Rathmines and Pembroke, townships separately governed, but as much part of Dublin as Kensington and Chelsea are of London), the strong pride of Belfast is amply justified. It is not its proximity to Scotch coalfields nor its moist climate (dear to spinners) which really makes its fortune, it is the hard-bitten, restless, courageous spirit of its people.

Like Dublin, it has close access to places of great natural charm. Just beyond Cave Hill, on the north shore of the lough, is Carrickfergus Castle, whose grim strength Mr. Williams has excellently suggested. It was built within six years of the Norman invasion, by de Courcy, first grantee of Ulster; and here, as at Carlingford, the invaders managed to retain their grip. The Bruces wrested it, after a fierce siege, from de Lacy, who then held it, Robert Bruce aiding his brother; but on Edward Brace's defeat it fell back to the English. In the ultimate conquest of Ireland it marked a great moment, for here William of Orange landed, and pious care has recorded the flagstone on which he first set his foot.

At Carrickfergus you are already well advanced on the prettiest road in all Ireland—that which skirts the northern shore of Belfast Lough, then, crossing the neck of Island Magee peninsula, carries you past Larne's inland water, and from Larne follows the cliffy shoreline up to where Fair Head marks the northern limit of Antrim's eastward-looking coast. Then, cutting in behind the Head, it emerges on the pleasant town of Ballycastle, sheltered in its bay, and so follows the coast again past the castles of Dunseverick and Dunluce, famous ruins, and past the Giant's Causeway, that still more famous piece of an older and more majestic architecture. Portrush ends your journey if you be a golfer; but dearer to me than the links at Portrush are the sandhills beyond Portstewart and the long strand at the entrance to Lough Foyle—ten miles of a stretch, but the Bann's outflow divides it. No other beach that I have known is rich in such a variety of shells; on no other sandhills do the little delicate sandflowers, ladies'-slipper, thyme, ladies'-bedstraw, and the rest, grow so charmingly.

Now, in all that long coastline what to write about? First, perhaps, its geography. A line of high hills, or low mountains, runs north from Belfast, and beyond Larne they approach close to the sea. Westward of them is prosperous industrial country, draining into Lough Neagh or the Bann—a country of thriving towns, Ballymena and Ballymoney, with many factories. But east of this is the marginal land, running steeply down with short watercourses to the sea, and this is the country of the Glens of Antrim; lordship of the MacDonnells, who were also Lords of the Isles. The sea here—Sruth na Maoile, the Stream of the Moyle, is a link rather than a barrier; you could row across with no great danger in a skin-covered boat; and at this point the Gael of Alba and the Gael of Eire have been always one race. The Irish that I heard spoken by old men whom a Feis of the Glens had gathered together in Glen Ariff was few removes in sound and even in idiom from the Highland speech; and all tradition, whether Ossianic, in the stories of Finn and his companions, or that older cycle of the Red Branch, brings the Scotch islands and west coast into full touch with Irish legend. It was to the Isle of Skye that Cuchulain went for his training, to be taught by a woman warrior—whose name that island keeps as the Coolin Hills preserve his name; it was from the Scottish shore that Cuchulain's son by the daughter of this warrior-queen came over to contend with the Red Branch heroes, refusing his name in order—so the deserted witch designed it—that his father, the one man able to master him, might unknowingly slay his own son. I took down from the lips of an Ulster peasant, not able to read or write, and perhaps with ten generations behind him of folk who never used the pen, the carefully guarded text of a poem framed not later (from its language) than the fifteenth century, which told the tragedy of that slaying. There is a touch in that ballad fine as any I know, when the dying lad says to his vanquisher:

That was the only sign he could give. Knowing himself, knowing his antagonist, yet sworn not to reveal the secret, he could only make a cast so half-hearted that surely Cuchulain might pause to wonder whether it was indeed an enemy who threw the spear.

These legends linking the coasts together suggest the charm of that eastern shore; not the magic of infinite distance, not the Atlantic's illimitable blue, but a continual tempting of the eye with that shore beyond the sea, sometimes not visible at all, often faint, an exquisite mirage, yet sometimes so vivid and distinct that you can discern even the whitewashed cabins on the farther side.

The mountains of the glens have no marvel of beauty. Slemish, lying back from the rest, is best marked, with its flat top, which is indeed evidently the crater of some volcano, forced up in the wild convulsion that has left its other traces in the basalt of Fair Head and the Causeway. Marked, too, it is in history; for on its slopes Patrick in captivity herded his master Dichu's swine. Yet this was on the landward of the hills, in the valley of the Braid, which drains west into Lough Neagh, and stands outside the grouping of the glens. Tibullia, another peak easily discerned, is distinguished by having on its summit a formation of flints where man of the Stone Age had a regular factory; chipped and flaked implements, marred in the making, can be found there (by the knowing) in basketfuls.

But the true distinction of these hills is that they have found their poet. Samuel Ferguson first in his ballad of "Willy Gilliland" (which has its climax by the walls of Carrickfergus) celebrated the stretch of green "from Slemish foot to Collon top". But it is a later singer, the poetess, "Moira O'Neill", who in her Songs of the Glens of Antrim, has made all their names resound: from "Slemish and Trostan, dark with heather", to "ould Lurgethan" where it "rises green by the sea". And not the hills only but the glens—Glenann, for which the emigrant "does be thinking long"; "lone Glen Dun and the wild glen flowers", with the little town at the outflow of its river, Cushendun, Cois-an-duin, Dun-foot. Her volume should be in the hands of every traveller in the glens, unless its verses are already written in his memory.

This Antrim coast has one charm distinguishing it above the rest of Ireland—its variety of geological formation. At the foot of Glen Ariff, Red Bay is called after the sandstone cliffs past which the road is cut, and in one place the rock makes an arch near an old castle. There is a cave, too, at various times inhabited. At Fair Head one reaches the basalt, and this huge promontory faces the sea with cliffs whose columnar formation gives that odd suggestion of human workmanship which reaches its climax at the Causeway. This black basalt with the numberless fissures is a good rock for birds to build in, but a very bad and treacherous dependence for those who climb to pry after their nests. Beyond the Causeway comes a line of white chalk cliff, such as is familiar to all in the south of England, but very strange to us in Ireland; though the sea off the Antrim coast is too deep to have that opaline appearance—as though milk were spilt into it—which the Margate tripper knows.

I have never yet been able to bring myself to write about the Causeway, which is a geological freak very curious to look at, and quite worth the sixpence you have to pay for admission, since a company enclosed it some years ago. But in Ireland we expect to have our cliff scenery free. The guides there will tell visitors plenty of comic stories about Finn MacCool. But Finn, in authentic Irish legend, is not a comic figure: he is the centre of the Ossianic tales.

That country north of the glens—which stop at Ballycastle, where Glen Shesk and Glen Tow have their meeting—is called the Route, and so keeps alive a memory of a period older than the Ossianic legends. Dal Riada, or Dal Reuda, that is, the "Portion of Reuda", was the name given to a principality established by one Reuda, who about the second century broke off with a body of followers from the kingdom of Ulster, and established rule on both sides of the narrow seas. Reuda was of the Pictish race, probably; and here in the north the Picts held out longest against the invading Milesians, who came (according to modern theories) drilled foot soldiers, to defeat the earlier chariot-fighting warriors. But the Milesians pushed their conquest here also in about the sixth century, and Fergus, an offshoot of the northern Hy-Neill (Sons of Niall), the dominant Milesian house, made a petty kingdom for himself on both shores; and from him the kings of Scotland traced their descent. This prince, Fergus Mac Erc, has left his name on the Irish coast, for Carrickfergus is shown as the rock on which he came to wreck, when sent adrift by tempest in one of his crossings between the two portions of his kingdom.

Shortly after its establishment, this kingship, or chieftainship, lost its Irish character and centred in Scotland. But relations were constant—though by no means constantly friendly—and the Lords of the Isles held Rathlin Island for many centuries. However near the Irish coast this island lies—only divided by some five miles from the base of Fair Head—the sound between it and the mainland is so dangerous, with its racing tides, as to be an effectual barrier; and very often passage may be easier made from the Scotch coast than from the bay of Ballycastle. At all events, the Mac Donnells owned Rathlin when Robert Bruce needed a refuge, and the castle is still there in which the Bruce sheltered for seven years—and in which it was that he watched the spider's patience and drew the moral for his own far-off designs.

The Mac Donnells were one of three great clans who divided a disputed lordship in Ulster before Ulster (last of the provinces) was finally subdued. The Mac Donnell lordship was the least authoritative and (although it traced descent to the sixth century) the latest in date. O'Neill and O'Donnell, the true Gaelic overlords of Ulster, sprang from two sons of Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Ireland from 379 to 405. Of their sons, Conall settled himself on Donegal Bay, and Eoghan (or Owen) on the Inishowen hills. Tyrconnell—Tir Chonaill—takes its name from the one son; Tyrone—Tir Eoghain—from the other. About these centres power grouped itself, each chief having sub-chiefs or urraghts under him, each with his own sept. It was only in the tenth century when Brian Boru was High King that the hereditary surnames came to be adopted—O'Neill for the lord of Tyrone, O'Donnell for the princes of Tyrconnell.

Their country was remote of access, difficult of passage for troops; their people were hardy; and so it happened that in the reign of Henry VIII, and even of Elizabeth, when all else in Ireland had been fairly brought within British sovereignty (even the O'Briens of Thomond submitting) O'Neill and O'Donnell could still hold their own. But mutual jealousies and border feuds weakened the Gael; the O'Neills were the strongest people, yet the O'Donnells on one flank and the Mac Donnells on the other often sought advantage by English alliance. Shane O'Neill, perhaps the most dangerous foe that Elizabeth had to meet in Ireland, of whom Sir Henry Sidney wrote that "this man could burn, if he liked, up to the gates of Dublin, and go away unfought", met his crushing defeat at the hand of Irish enemies, the O'Donnells, who routed him on the Swilly river near Letterkenny; and in his trouble he fled to unfriends on the other side, the Mac Donnells, in whose camp at Cushendun he was poniarded, and his head sold to the English.

Yet after his day another O'Neill, Hugh the great Earl of Tyrone, levied desperate war on the English, in close league with a successor of the O'Donnell who defeated Shane; and though the Mac Donnells gave them no direct assistance, they also made an effort at that time to throw off the invader's yoke. The history of Ireland under Elizabeth is largely the history of war with these three clans—and a shameful history it is, full of horrible records of treachery and cruelty.

Each of the three peoples threw up remarkable leaders in the final struggles under the Tudors, and no figure of those days is more notable than the MacDonnell chief, Somhairle Buidhe, "Yellow Charles", Sorley Boy, as the English wrote him: and often the State Papers had occasion to write his name between 1558, when he came to lordship of the North, and 1590, when he died (singularly enough) a natural death in his own castle of Duneynie and was buried among all the Mac Donnells in the Abbey at Bonamargy near Ballycastle. Two sayings of his are memorable. They showed him the head of his son impaled above the gate of Dublin Castle. "My son," he retorted, "has many heads." And in truth that stock sprung up like nettles after cutting.—Elizabeth, in one of the phases of her diplomacy, sought to enlist this warrior on her side, and sent him a patent for his estates and chieftaincy as Lord of the Pale, engrossed on parchment. They brought him the writing to his castle of Dunluce, and he hacked the scroll to shreds. "With the sword I won it," he said; "I will never keep it with the sheepskin."

Nevertheless, time brought him counsel, and when Sir John Perrot, Henry VIII's bastard, came and battered Dunluce with cannon, Sorley, now eighty years of age, made his submission and travelled to Dublin, to pay his homage to the Queen's picture, going on his knees to kiss the embroidered pantoufle on the royal foot. After his death, his son Randal joined the rising of Hugh O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell; but when that last great effort to throw off England's power was foiled by the defeat at Kinsale, the Mac Donnell made submission, and Elizabeth's successor, James, who after all had a natural kindness for the Mac Donnells (seeing that they were to the last Scotch rather than Irish) accepted his submission and endowed him with the whole territory from the Cutts of Coleraine to the Curran of Larne.

Dunluce, which stands on a projecting rock, approached only by a narrow footway over a very deep natural trench, has to stand a battery more continuous than Perrot's cannon could bring to bear. The sea is under it, for a cave pierces the rock, and wind and wave are for ever straining at the old fortress. Part of it fell in 1639, and to-day they say the whole ruin is menaced with collapse; and, since it stands in private grounds, no public authority can intervene to save it.

For some heads the crossing of that wall into Dunluce has a danger; and a fall would be serious. But the real test of resistance to giddiness can be made at the famous hanging bridge which joins the mainland with the island rock of Carrickarede, near Port Ballintoy. The bridge consists of planks laid two abreast, and lashed to ropes; a single rope is the only handrail. The people use it to get out to their nets and boats for the salmon fishing, which are kept out here, and also, since there is grass on the island, for carrying sheep across on their backs. For my own part I stepped on to it readily enough; but when it bent down steeply under me, and inclined to swing, the surprise was not pleasant. And though I forced myself to cross it a second time, back and forward, to convince myself that there was no necessity for qualms, I cannot say that the qualms wholly disappeared. As for carrying a sheep over, or a bale of nets, heaven defend me! But I never heard that anyone, native or tourist, drunk or sober, came to grief there! The drop is about eighty feet into deep water between cliffs.