storm; now muffled and mysterious with mist, only to gaze out on you
again with clear and candid sunshine. Here the trout leaps; there the
eagle soars; and there beyond the wild deer dash through the arbutus
coverts, through which they have come to the margin of the lake to
drink, and, scared by your footstep or your oar, are away back to
crosiered bracken or heather covered moorland. But the first, the final,
the deepest and most enduring impression of Killarney is that of beauty
unspeakably tender, which puts on at times a garb of grandeur and a look
of awe, only in order to heighten by passing contrast the sense of soft
insinuating loveliness. How the missel thrushes sing, as well they may!
How the streams and runnels gurgle, and leap, and laugh! For the sound
of journeying water is never out of your ears; the feeling of the moist,
the fresh, the vernal, is never out of your heart. My companion agreed
with me, that there is nothing in England or Scotland as beautiful as
Killarney--meaning by Killarney its lakes, its streams, its hills, its
vegetation; and if mountain, wood, and water--harmoniously
blent--constitute the most perfect and adequate loveliness that nature
presents, it surely must be owned that it has all the world over no
superior."

[Illustration: _Photo, Lawrence, Dublin._ Shooting the Rapids.]

Leaving the ~Upper Lake~ behind, and bidding adieu to the green islands
that stud its breast with arbutus and the cedars of Lebanon, the Old
Weir Bridge meets the eye. 'Neath its arch the waters come down with
foam and force, the oars are shipped, and we shoot straight through the
eye of the rapid, thanks to the strong arm and sure nerve of the
oarsmen. The beautiful reach here is the bosom "where the bright waters
meet." Amid exquisite combination of colour, a Vallambrosa strewed with
ferns, lichens, mosses, rich green hollies and arbutus with many
coloured berries, we tread our way by a passage of beauty round Dinis
Island into the ~Middle~ or ~Torc Lake~, sheltered by the broad breast
of the mountain from which it takes its name. Like "Muckross," the
"Pleasant Point of Wild Swine," the name Torc is called after the wild
boars, which in former years went "gerasening" over its slopes. Rising
abruptly, the mountain stands clear between Mangerton and Glena, the
lower sides well wooded. ~Innis Dinish~, the island at the "beginning of
the waters," is the port for boats. The Cottage may be visited. The
Whirlpool,