not a man in the village can spare a horse." "Well, and can you hire one?" "No, Sir, but I can lend him, and he is very much at your service, and I will also send a boy to guide you to the place, and a message to the man who owns the boat, in order that he may ferry you to the island." Now, my good reader, if you have been a traveller either in England or on the Continent, no matter whether it was a Swiss, or an Italian, or a British lake you were travelling towards, I feel almost certain that you have not met with a more accommodating inn-keeper than mine inn host of Petigo; perhaps you never had the use of a post horse for nothing; accordingly, accepting of the facilities afforded me, I set out on horseback, attended by my guide; and I can say truly that a safer horse, or a more intelligent little guide I could not have desired. The guide was a boy about fourteen years old-a loose, barefooted, agile youth, with an open countenance, and a lively eye." Do you often go to Lough Derg?" "Oh very often in the season, your

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honor; I go to pick up a penny by holding the horses of the clargy and the quality when they come to the station, please your honor," "You are a Catholic, no doubt?" "To be sure, your honor." "And were there many here this year?" "Ah no-what they call the Jubilee has spoiled the place out and out for this year." "And well, and my fine fellow, can you read?" "No in troth I cannot." "And why not? it is a pity that a boy of your age and smartness cannot read." "Och indeed Sir, but it is a pity; and after all it is not my fault: my mother, who is a poor widow, cannot afford to pay for my schooling, and I went for a time to the Protestant school; but the priest, God bless him, took me away from it, and sent me to a school in the chapel; which he set up to take away the scholars from the Protestant school; but Sir, the chapel school died away, and is gone to nothing, and I lost my luck for edication." "Well and my good boy, do you know your catechism?" "A bit of it, Sir." ❝ Come now, what 's the fourth commandment ?”

"Oh please your honor, I have not come to that yet." But if my poor companion, who thus, at this most interesting and capable period of his life, was so ignorant and totally destitute of every portion of religious and useful knowledge, it was not so with his mind in other respects: it was well furnished with all the country news and the traditionary stories about St. Patrick's purgatory, which he told me with a lively facility that bespoke ingenuity gone astray, and talent run to waste.

The road from the village of Petigo leading towards Lough Derg, runs along a river tumbling over rocks; and then after proceeding for a time over a boggy valley, you ascend into a dreary and mountainous tract, extremely ugly in itself, but from which you have a fine view indeed of the greatest part of the upper lake of Lough Erne with its many elevated islands, and all its hilly shores, green, wooded, and cultivated, with the interspersed houses of its gentry, and the comfortable cottages of its yeomanry. The finest yeomanry in Ireland: men living in

comparative comfort, and having in their figures and bearing that elevation of character which a sense of loyalty and independence confers. I had at length, after travelling about three miles, arrived where the road was discontinued, and by the direction of my guide ascended a mountain path that brought me through a wretched village and led to the top of a hill: here my boy left me and went to look for the man who was to ferry us to purgatory, and on the ridge where I stood I had leisure to look around. To the southwest lay Lough Erne, with all its isles and cultivated shores: to the north-west Lough Derg, and truly never did I mark such a contrast-Lough Derg under my feet -the lake, the shores, the mountains, the accompaniments of all sorts presented the very landscape of desolation-its waters expanding in their highland solitude, amidst a wide waste of moors, without one green spot to refresh the eye, without a house or tree -all mournful in the brown hue of its far stretching bogs, and the grey uniformity of

its rocks; the surrounding mountains even partook of the sombre character of the place-their forms without grandeur, their ranges continuous and without elevation. The lake itself was certainly as fine as rocky shores and numerous islands could make it, but it was encompassed with such dreariness -it was deformed so much by its purgatorial island-the associations connected with it were of such a degrading character, that really the whole prospect before me, struck my mind with a sense of painfulness, and I said to myself, "I am already in purgatory;' a person who had never seen the picture that was now under my eye-who had read of a place consecrated by the devotion of ages, towards which the tide of human superstition had flowed for twelve centuries, might imagine that St.Patrick's purgatory, secluded in its sacred island would have all the venerable and gothic accompaniments of olden time; and its ivyed towers and belfried steeples—its carved windows and cloistered arches; its long dark aisles and fretted vaults, would have risen out