when bugles are playing and cannons roaring from morn to dewy eve.

Emerging from the Gap, we were "to save a mile, and see the best of the scenery," and to effect this, we were taken over a country, which is, I dare say, a pleasant one for Mrs. Moriarty's goats, but to bipeds in boots (and one must be neat, you know, with so many pretty girls about), is by no means of an agreeable character. To derive consolation from the calamities of others is humiliating, but natural; "il y a toujours quelque chose," says the French cynic, "qui nous ne déplait point, dans les malheurs d'autrui ;" " and I found, I am ashamed to say, considerable refreshment in surveying the distress of a portly old gentleman, who, impinging a good deal on the craggiest parts, "larded the lean earth as he walked along,"

"and panted hard,

A's one who feels a nightmare in his bed,

When all the house is mute."

I saw from the knolls and undulations, which diversified the surface of his enormous shoes, that his Pilgrim's Progress had a good deal to do with Bunyan's, although his adjurations were not of that pious kind, which would have issued from the lips of the "preaching tinker," and the deities, to whom he referred in his affliction, were, principally, Zounds and Jingo.

But we soon found a truer solace in the view of Coom Dhuv, the Black Valley, and in listening to the roar of its mountain streams, which, rising and falling upon the breeze, sounded as though some monster train bore giants over the hills, at express speed, with Gog and Magog for Guard and Stoker !

Lo! the dark valley darkens, and its foaming waterfalls seem to whiten beneath the low black clouds; and we stay not to visit

Cottage, to the Upper Lake, where, a boat awaiting us, we embark Here, before a glowing fire, a fresh

for Rohnaine's Island. caught salmon, cut into steaks, was broiling on arbutus skivers; and the founder of the feast, an Irish gentleman, whom we brought from the shore in our boat, hospitably invited us to postpone our luncheon until his guests arrived. Hungry, and anxious to proceed, we declined his courteous offer; but we should not have done so, had we been aware that he was awaiting the delightful party from Tralee. Alas, just as we had commenced our repast, and the boat so preciously freighted was descried in the distance, our pluvial fears were realised,

"And, in the scowl of heaven, each face
Grew dark as we were speaking."

It was piteous to see those girls come ashore, with the gentlemen's overcoats enveloping their fairy forms, and protecting their best bonnets; and I never experienced so strong a desire in my life to be transformed into a gig-umbrella.

Suddenly the weather brightened, but not so the prospects of the pretty pic-nic. There was a brief colloquy between master and men, sounds of surprise and disappointment, not loud but deep, and then a general laughter, but dismally artificial; for the knives, and the plates, and the wine, and the bread, every

L

thing, in fact, except the salmon, just ready in its hot perfection, had been sent to the wrong Island! Thither, to our grim despair,

St. Lumbago of Sciatica, I could have plunged into the flood, and followed in their lee, had I not been cognisant of a certain 'alacrity in sinking," which prevents the simultaneous removal of both my legs from the bottom. What would I not have given, to have changed places with the cockswain! I should have felt proud and happy as he who steered the immortal Seven at Henley, or as Edgar the Peaceable, when, keeping his court at Chester, and having a mind to go by water to the monastery of St. John Baptist, he was rowed down the Dee in a barge by eight Kings, himself sitting at the helm.*

We mourned awhile, but the spirit of youth endures not to sorrow long. It bends low, but it will not break. It rises again in all its freshness after two glasses of bitter beer, with just a mouthful of whiskey; and we soon looked our affliction in the face like men, and played the nightingale upon our empty bottles. I have studied somewhat sedulously to imitate, with a moistened cork upon glass, "de nightingirl, de lark, de trush" (as the ever-to-be-retained Von Joel hath it), and the performance was so successful, that two finches perched, attentively, within a yard of our heads, while the boatmen listened as admiringly as the Australian Diggers to the English lark; † and a newly-married

* Rapin, vol. i., p. 106.

+ See the exquisite description in It is never too late to mend, p. 359.