WE arrived at Carrs Hotel, in Clifden, between 5 and 6 p.m., and strolled down the main street before dinner. The whitewashed houses are much less miserable than the cottages we had seen in the country, but we can give no more than negative praise, the general aspect of the town being dreary enough. There are happy associations, nevertheless, connected with it, for the whole place arose from a benevolent attempt of Mr. D'Arcy, once the owner of Clifden Castle, to improve the condition and evoke the energies of his neighbours; and though the estate has passed into other hands, a D'Arcy still maintains, as pastor of the people, an honoured name for charity and zeal. After dinner we had a most delightful ramble on the cliffs, which overlook the bay; for Clifden is built at the centre of one of those numerous indentations in the land,

and which give the name Connamara, i.e., “the bays of the sea.” It was one of those evenings, sunlit and serene, which whisper gratitude and peace. There seemed to be a glad smile on land and sea, as the golden light fell in soft splendour on the purple hills, and the pleasant breeze awoke upon the waters [Greek passage] 1

(Yes, good critic, I know it is only a school-boy's quotation, but it is too beautiful to be ever quite used-up, and is at all events, excusable in an undergraduate, “taking up,” among other books for his Degree, the sublime tragedy of Prometheus Bound.) There was no sound except the curlew's note, when suddenly we heard, far down from the sea below us, the loud splash of water, and voices singing, amid merry laughter, strange songs in an unknown tongue.

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Gracious Heavens, what were we to see! We were on Irish ground; the stillness and the solitude, so wildly broken, encouraged all our superstitious fancies; and everything we had read or heard of Bogies, Banshees, Kelpies, and Co., came back to our astonised souls. Were we, really, to witness something supernatural at last, something, which, when we got home, should make the teeth of our neighbours chatter, and cause the hair to stand up on our relations' heads?

Perhaps, we were to contemplate the merman bold, playing—

With beating hearts and bated breath, we crawled to the edge of the precipice, and there saw, to our intense delight, four of the jolliest constables in the world, swimming, diving, floating, spluttering, shouting, and singing, until one longed to run back a few yards, plunge in, like Cassius, without undressing, and join in their jolly gymnastics. Really, they are glorious fellows! Were I to undertake any distant or dangerous expedition (and indeed, Frank and I have been so much gratified by our sailor-like deportment, between Holyhead and Kingstown, that we think seriously of going round the world in a yacht), I should vastly like to take half a dozen of them with me; and I should not be the first who had so thought and acted.

Walking on, we came in sight of Clifden Castle, a good-looking modern residence, lying low in the valley, and well screened by timber from the rough sea-wind. Here the view is beautiful exceedingly, and we sat among the heather, and gazed upon it,

Then we returned to the hotel, and there found our friend the cutler considerably advanced in liquor, making a most disconnected oration to a select audience, in which, among many other statements unhappily forgotten, he informed us:—“That he was hopen to show pigeons, either Turbits, Pouters, or Short-faced Mottles, against any man in Hengland, bar two; that Ireland was nothing but a big bog, and he should rather expect as ow no party, as wasn't a snipe, would ever come there twice; that he would play hany gent, as was agreeable so to do, either at quoits or skittles, for the valley of a new 'at;” (being rather a dab with the discus, I was about to accept his challenge, when the darkness of the night and absence of the implements struck me as being “staggerers” not to be surmounted, and therefore I held my peace); “that, has no party seem'd hup to nothing, he should beg to propose 'ealth and prosperity to the firm of Messrs. Strop and Blades (I'm Blades); and should conclude by hexpressing his ope, that the cock-eyed gent in the corner would henliven the meeting with a comic song.” The proprietor of the insurbordinate eye having very briefly expressed himself to the effect, that he would see the company consigned to perdition, rather than indulge it with mirthful music, Mr. Blades commenced a concert on his own account; and we ventured to go to bed, in spite of the singer's solemn warning that any person retiring, in a state of sobriety, to his couch, would “fall as the leaves do, fall as the leaves do, fall as the leaves do, that die in October.”

Nemesis was the daughter of Nox; and poor Blades looked miserably ill, when he came down next morning to breakfast—no, not to break fast, but only to wish he could. At daybreak, we had heard sounds of soda-water, but Schweppe had striven in vain. The fact is, that whiskey, like love, can “brook no rival near its throne,” and Kinahan, and Bass, and Guinness were at war all over Blades. We scarcely knew him again, as he sat in rueful contemplation of an egg, which he had accepted, hoping against hope, but had now no strength to crack:—

Had he been Tyndarus, and the egg before him one of Leda's, he could not have looked at it with a more fixed and mystified expression; or he might have been reflecting sorrowfully upon that fatal goose egg, which, long before the Norman Conquest, had wrought such woes on Ireland. I will venture, at all events, to repeat the legend. Domhnall, the king, having invited Congal, his foster-son, together with the principal swells of his court, to a grand banquet (though he had been warned by Maelcobba, a celebrated monk and fortune-teller, to do nothing of the kind), sent out his purveyors to procure a supply of delicacies in general, and of goose eggs in particular. Now there lived, in the county of Meath, a Bishop Ere of Slaine, who spent his days in the river Boyne, immersed up to his arm-pits, and reading his psalter, which lay upon the bank. Whether he entertained hopes of being translated to the see of Bath and Wells, and was under a course of preparatory training, or whether he had a prescient belief in the water-cure, or whatever his motives may have been, thus he passed his mornings (to the immense edification of his diocese, and with nothing on but his mitre), and then went home to dine. One evening he had hurried to his hermitage, a little ruffled in temper, having been very disrespectfully accosted during the day by some boatmen, who had hit him in the eye with a decayed pear, but consoling himself with the prospect of his favourite dinner, namely, “a goose egg and a half, and three sprigs of watercresses,” when he was dismayed to find his establishment (which consisted of an elderly charwoman) in tears, and to hear that the king's purveyors had been, and poached his eggs for him. Then (the chroniclers proceed to tell) the Bishop he “cussed, and eke swore hee, verrye bewtifulle.” He excommunicated the auxiliary gander and put the goose under a perpetual pip, “bekase,” said he, “if they'd niver layed them, and she (the charwoman) had only popped them under the bedclothes, he'd bet six to four they'd niver been found.” But he was grandest of all, when he cursed the eggs, shell, white, and yolk, solemnly imploring complete and speedy suffocation upon any party who should stick a spoon in them. And his anathemas, we read, were so far fruitful, that on the night of the King's banquet, Congal's goose egg changed, as he was gloating over it, into a common hen egg, whereupon he was so greatly exasperated, that he felt himself under the necessity of slashing at his neighbours indiscriminately with a drawn sword; a general battle ensued; and “Ireland was not for one night thenceforward in the enjoyment of peace or tranquillity.” 1

Blades, I say, might have been meditating mournfully on this accursed egg, but, whether or no, there he sat; and Melancholy marked him for her own. Quantum mutatus! The remains of a fire balloon, soaked and rusting in some long damp grass, not less resemble the gaudy globe, which went up yesternight; and never can I obliviate the agony of his expression, as the waiter presented a large dish of bacon in close proximity to his nose.

We also, having contributed to Mr. Carr's Album autographs, which will, no doubt, be ultimately sold at sixty guineas a-piece, (say pounds, if you take the pair) proceeded by the car to Kylemore.

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