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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 the mermaids, in and out of the rocks,
Dressing their hair with the white sea-flower,
And holding them back by their flowing locks.”
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,
“till the sun
Grew broader toward his death, and fell; and all
The rosy heights came out above the lawns.”
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.”