ugly town, apparently a place of some trade and business, with a fine river running down to Derry. At four o'clock in the evening I hired a jaunting-car to carry me into the highlands of Donegal, a distance of about twenty-two miles, and late at night I arrived at my friend's house, after travelling along roads almost impassable, over hills almost inaccessible, every ligature and joint of my poor body nearly jaunted into dislocation. However, cordial hospitality, a soft bed, and a day's quiet, repaired and restored me so far as to enable us to begin our excursion and mountain rambles. My friend's glebe-house lies in a fine valley in the north-western district of Donegal, called the Barony of Kilmacrenan, and the whole district is the estate of Trinity College. This valley is watered by two beautiful rivers, which having worked their way and escaped from the mountains, here join and expand into a broad lake interspersed with islands, and surrounded by hills of the most abrupt and varied forms. Directly behind my friend's house rose a mountain

the loftiest of the chain, bare, rugged, its sharp white silicious peaks glittering in the sunshine. "What is this mountain called, it is the monarch of these hills?" "It is called Lough Salt." "Why Lough that is the Irish for a lake, not of a mountain; I suppose you mean Knocksalt."-" Instead of disputing about its name let us get better acquainted with it, and suppose we go after breakfast to its top." The day invited, so we set out on quiet, comfortable ponies. A broad road led up the hill, which my friend informed me was until lately the only pass that led from Dublin, or from Derry to Ards, Dunfanaghy, and the whole north-western coast of Donegal. The mountain rose like a wall before us, yet up that wall the road valiantly climbed, the ponies toiled up it panting and perspiring; it must be a pretty experiment for a carriage to venture on, and to mend the matter, the road is constructed as a hard causeway, every stone composing it as large as a quartern loaf. But we took our time, the ponies were nothing loath to

stop as well as ourselves, and as we looked back on the country beneath us, the whole valley lay smiling under our feet, with its lake, and rivers, and tillage, and meadows, and corn-fields, and my friend's comfortable glebe-house, surrounded by his cherished and thriving plantations: farther still in the circle extended a panorama of encircling hills, and farther still in the blue distance of the extreme horison lay mingling with the clouds, the mountains of Innishowen, and Derry, and Tyrone; all forming a picture fit for a painter to sketch and for me to remember.

Thus, now and then talking of the prospect, and again caught in our recollections of old college times-times alas too much mispent, too much misapplied,—we at length reached the top of the mountain ridge, and suddenly turning the point of a cliff that jutted out and checked the road, we came abruptly into a hollow something like a crater of an extinct volcano, which was filled almost entirely by a lovely lake, on the right hand side of which rose the highest peak of the mountain, com

posed of compact silicious sandstone, so bare, so white, so serrated, so tempest-worn, so vexed with all the storms of the Atlantic, that if mere matter could suffer, we might suppose that this lofty and precipitous peak presented the portrait of material endurance; and still though white was the prevailing colour, yet not one tint or shadowing that decks and paints a mountain's brow was wanting. Here the brown heath, the grey lichen, the green fern, the red crane's bill; and straight down the cliff, from its topmost peak to the water's edge, was branded in a dark and blasted line, the downward track of a meteoric stone that had fallen from the atmosphere, and shattering itself against the mountain's crest, rolled down in fiery and smoking fragments into the adjacent lake. Last year, amidst the crash of a thunder-storm this phenomenon occurred; and the well-defined line of its burning progress is and will be for years apparent. On the other side of the lake a fair verdant bank presented itself, courting the traveller to sit down and take his rest after winding

his toilsome way up the long ascent, into this peaceful and unexpected retreat; gentle and grassy knolls were here and there interspersed, on which sheep of most picturesque leanness, some black and some white, with primitive crumpled horns, were grazing. But the lake-not a breath was abroad on its expanse; it smiled as it reflected the grey mountain and the azure face of heaven: it seemed as if on this day the Spirit of the Atlantic had fallen asleep, and air, earth and ocean were celebrating the festival of repose : the waters of the lake, of the colour and clearness of the sky were

"Blue; darkly, deeply, beautifully blue :"

You could look down a hundred fathoms deep, and still no bottom: speckled trouts floating at immense depths, seemed as if they soared in ether-then the stillness of the whole scene-you seemed lifted as it were out of the turmoil of the world into some planetary paradise, into some such place as the Apostle in the Apocalypse was invited to,