which bears a high price, I believe about five shillings per pound, and about two dozen of these birds furnish a pound; it is therefore a most tempting employment for these poor people; for an active and experienced man can take three or four dozen every day, but it is accompanied with immense danger, and annually two or three or more fall a sacrifice, and are dashed to pieces. This practice of taking birds is described in some treatises on Natural History, so I shall not trouble my reader with it here. I shall therefore proceed further along the promontory where the cliff arose not so high, to where the curious natural phenomenon occurs, called M'Swine's Gun, which is caused by a horizontal cavern running for many yards under the cliff, from whence a perpendicular shaft rises to the surface, and this is called M'Swine's Gun. This particular point, lies open to the north-west, and when the tempest sets in from that quarter, the storm forces the sea with tremendous power into the cavern, and whenever the gale is most fitful, and an immense

surge beats in, up flies the water through the perpendicular shaft like the Geiser spring in Iceland, some hundreds of feet high, accompanied with a report louder than any piece of artillery, and the shot of M'Swine's Gun is asserted to have been heard in the city of Derry.

C. O.

SKETCHES IN DONEGAL.

LETTER III.

TO THE REV. SIR F. L. B-SSE.

On the following day my friend and I set out to retrace our steps homeward, and to vary our route; we returned along the shores of the deep land-locked arm of the sea called Mulroy Bay. Nothing can equal the variety that this water presents; here, like a beautiful and placid lake winding through mountains, and without any apparent outlet; there, like a broad and magnificent river; and again opening into a fine harbour in which navies might ride in safety. Formerly the hills and shores of

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the bay were covered with timber. The oak, ash, hazel, in stunted copsewood, still cover the declivities; if these beautiful shores were in any other country they would be improved, cherished, and resorted to, but here no one comes. The cormorants, the curlews, and the sandpipers stood on the rocks over these solitary waters, and seemed to wonder what brought two beings in the garb of gentlemen to molest their loneliness. Adjoining this water, on a mountain ridge about two miles off from the shore, my friend brought me to see a place called the Giant's Grave. We walked up to it through a wet and mossy mountain, and on the summit of the ridge, in the middle of the moor, and surrounded by a peat-bog, were two long caves, or rather troughs, composed of immense stones, joined in the shape of coffins, and covered over with large flag stones; one of these coffins was about thirty-four and the other about twenty feet long, and from four to six feet broad. I could obtain no account from the inhabitants, who were Protestants,

of the origin or use of these strange formations. They said they knew nothing about them, but that they were giants' graves-I never in any other mountain district of Ireland saw any thing similar, and ever since I have been puzzling my brain how to account for them. I remember some years ago having found a vitrified fort on the top of one of the mountains of Cavan, the only one that has been observed in Ireland. I sent up a specimen of the vitrified material to the Royal Irish Academy, and also an account of the fort. A learned Theban of that Society said that my specimen must have come from a glass-house, and he gravely maintained that my fort was the ruin of an old manufactory of glass, although others present objected to his solution, hinting that it was rather an improbable place to erect a glass-house on one of the highest hills in Ulster. In the same way I suppose that some philosopher will say that my mountain sarcophagi are only places for burning kelp, never considering that to drag sea-weed up to the top of a