There was but one disaster during our brief sojourn at the Sea View Hotel. A few sausages and a tin of sardines remained, "spared," as Mary Kate said, from the first repast. These she proposed to store, for safety and coolness, in one of our bedrooms. The idea not being well received, she finally deposited them in the Post Office, which was attached to the hotel. But even this hiding place was not improbable enough to hoodwink that skilled tactician, the hotel cat, and he, in some dark hour of the night, found and feasted on them with, no doubt, all the ravishing joy of a new experience.
IN WEST CARBERY
We could not but sympathise with him. Thanks to the Sea View Hotel that subtle joy was also ours.
I began by saying that of the Summer holidays the times of anticipation and of retrospect were the times of truest pleasure. Yet I can remember long September days beside a sea of Mediterranean blue, the sea of Southern Ireland, when the perfect present asked nothing of either past or future. The long creek wound, blue-green as a peacock's breast, between deep woods. High places of rock and heather were there, where you could lie, "ringed with the azure world," and see the huge liners, yes, and hear them too, as they went throbbing and trampling along the sun's path westward.
Those who know this place of holiday are comparatively few, but there is at least one distinguished name of the company—Dean Swift, no less. A couple of hundred years or so ago, he spent a summer in West Carbery, (an ivy-covered ruin, known as Swift's Tower, testifies to the fact,) and he forthwith made a poem about it, a Latin poem, addressed to the Rocks of Carbery.
One gathers that it was of the nature of an encomium, though the points selected for description are not those that would tempt the effete holiday maker of to-day. Possibly it was the Dean's majestic eighteenth-century manner of thanking his host for "a very pleasant visit." I came upon it in the house of a descendant of that host, reverently quoted in a copy of Dr. Smith's history of the County Cork, dated 1749. Thanks to the sympathetic scholarship of a contemporary divine, the Revd. Dr. Donkin, who made a translation of it, I am able to give some quotations from it. Dr. Smith thinks that "the Dean's descriptions are as just as his numbers are beautiful." It is not for me to disagree with him. Let them—or some of them—dignify these unworthy pages.
"Lo! From the top of yonder cliff, that shrouds
Its airy head amidst the azure clouds,
Hangs the huge fragment, destitute of props,
Prone on the waves the rocky ruin drops.
* * * * *
Oft too with hideous yawn, the cavern wide
Presents an orifice on either side;
A dismal orifice, from sea to sea
Extended, pervious to the god of day.