During the Irish famine an attempt was made to dig a canal connecting the lakes, so as to give the people something to do, and an enormous amount of money was sunk in the project. The rocky bed absorbed the water, however, as fast as it flowed in, and the enterprise proved an utter failure. Every visitor asks what it is when he sees it. It is called "The Great Blunder."
[LEENANE TO RECESS]
Next morning, with new car, horse, and driver, we put off for Leenane, twenty-seven miles away. We drove along the banks of Lough Mask, with its groups of small, wooded islands, and left it to take the road along Lough Nafooey, a very picturesque drive. After some hours of driving, we put up at McKeown's Hotel in Leenane. "Mac" is a Pooh-Bah, a tall, strapping young Irishman, a "six-foot-twoer," with an intermittent laugh that takes most of the sting out of his hotel bills, and he holds the complimentary title of "The Major." He runs an up-to-date hotel, is postmaster, owns a store, has all the mail-posting contracts, rents salmon and trout rivers and lakes, ships salmon to London, and owns ten thousand acres of shooting-land stocked with grouse, hares, snipe, duck, and cock, which he lets to visitors, as well as seal shooting on the bay. He also owns a sheep mountain, from which he serves mutton to his guests in all the ways that mankind has ever known since sheep were first slaughtered for food. We had on succeeding days, as part of the menu, roast mutton (hot and cold), stewed lamb, boiled leg, roast saddle, minced lamb, mutton cutlets, broiled kidneys, lamb chops, Irish stew, suet-pudding, sweetbreads, French chops, sheep's-head, and mutton broth. We fancied we could detect wool growing on the palms of our hands when we left the hotel, and could have forgiven "Mac" if we could only have found it starting on the tops of our heads instead. At another hotel in a fishing centre we had an aquarium style of living, which in time became monotonous: they served up in the course of time for our delectation, salmon boiled and salmon broiled, cold salmon, salmon steak, salmon croquettes, salmon cutlets, and stewed salmon, intersticed with white trout, black trout, yellow trout, brown trout, sea trout, speckled trout, and gillaroo. But at Recess they combined such things with chops, duck, green pease, lobster, and Irish sole right out of the nearby sea. All hail, Recess! And long life to Polly, the peach-cheeked waitress who served us so nimbly!
Next morning we crossed Killary Bay in a boat, and while doing so we noticed that the captain held his leg in a very constrained position. We asked him if it was stiff, or if he was troubled with rheumatism. "No; to tell your honor the truth, there's a hole in the boat, an' I'm jist kapin' me heel in it to save her from sinkin'."
After landing we drove to Delphi to see its lake and woods; then on to Lough Dhu, a long sheet of water from the banks of which the mountains rise to a height of twenty-five hundred feet. Delphi is one of the loveliest spots in Connemara, but we can hardly go as far as the enthusiastic Englishman who wrote: "It may be safely said that if Connemara contained no other beauty, Delphi alone would be worth the journey from London, for the sake of the mountain scenery." Delphi House formerly belonged to the Marquis of Sligo, and at one time he lived there. We returned by driving round the head of the bay, with a horse that would have retarded a funeral procession. Within a mile of the hotel there is a double echo, which we tested by loud whistling on our fingers. After crossing the bay, the echo came back to us with great strength, striking our side of the mountain again and thus making a second echo.
WATER-FALL IN THE MARQUIS OF SLIGO'S DEMESNE, WESTPORT, COUNTY MAYO
On the morning before we left, I lay in bed half asleep, and, as the bedrooms in the west of Ireland rarely have any locks on their doors, our confidential "boots" stole quietly into the room and, looking at me, soliloquized in a tender tone, suggestive of a tip if I should hear him: "Sure, his honor is slapin' loike a baby, an' 'twould be nothin' short of a crime to wake him up this wet mornin'; I haven't the heart to do it." And he walked out of the room with his eye on the future.