BY KILLARNEY’S LAKES.
Killarney, June 8, 1905.
We have spent four days in the Irish mountains and have ridden a hundred miles in a jaunting-car and coach. I have had mountain scenery, lake scenery and plain scenery for every meal in the day. I enjoy scenery, but I fear I am getting it in too large quantities and am having it shaken too well while taking. Sunday was spent in Glengariff, a picturesque place where the mountains rise abruptly from the salt water of Bantry bay. Monday we coached from Glengariff to Killarney and Tuesday we did the lakes with a jaunting-car, slightly assisted by a row-boat. The Irish mountains are not as high as the Rocky Mountains, but they are a very good imitation. The Rockies are grand and beautiful. The mountains of Cork and Kerry are pretty and beautiful. The Irish mountains are covered with green. It is as if the Rocky Mountains were smaller, covered with ivy and moss, dotted here and there with whitewashed cottages and flocks of sheep, and topped with a blue sky which is bluer than any indigo and clearer than any crystal.
There are several ruined castles about Killarney. I am already getting to shy at ruined castles. The proposal to visit one makes my feet ache as an approaching thunder-storm affects some people’s corns. We first went to Muckross Abbey, a well-preserved ruin about 400 years old. The Muckross family, which owned the estate, has played out, and the property has been bought by Guinness, the Dublin brewer, who was made a lord by Queen Victoria. Whatever the earl of Kenmare does not own around Killarney belongs to Guinness. You can imagine how Muckross Abbey looked 300 years ago when the old monks lived there and occupied the cells and cloister now unroofed. The banquet hall has a big fireplace and there are dark spiral stairways running up and down such as you read about in Ivanhoe. On the tombstones are inscriptions telling of the virtues and sanctity of knights and lords who would be considered tough bats if they lived nowadays and swaggered around as they did in the good old times. I like to look at old tombstones and wonder what the men who lie beneath them would say if they could read the catalogue of virtues accredited to them. I always think of the little girl who had evidently been visiting Muckross Abbey, or some such place, and anxiously inquired if the people in those days did not bury bad folks, as all who were interred there were supremely good. And then the thought comes up that all of these men were great and strong in their time, making history and imagining that they were cutting a gash in the world. Now they are forgotten and their deeds unknown, and they are the subjects of sportive remarks by tourists from a country they never heard of.
The lakes of Killarney have been praised in prose and verse, and they are up to the advance advertising. They are not large, but they nestle among the mountains and reflect on their clear surface the heights that surround them. There is a legend everywhere and the Irish driver knows them all. Here is a reasonable one: One of the O’Donohues, which family was once the royal power in Kerry, was hunting in the mountains. He met the devil, and the two had an altercation in which O’Donohue got decidedly the best of the argument. The devil became so angry that he bit a big chunk out of a mountain. O’Donohue took his shillelah and hit the devil so hard a crack that he dropped the mouthful of mountain into the lake. This tale must be true, for as the driver said: “There’s the place the devil bit and it is called so to this day, and out in the lake is the little island of rock, just as the devil dropped it into the water.”
Everybody who has read Tom Moore—and if anyone has not he should do so—will remember the lines:
“There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet