ted and compressed agony of weeks, but no word of
complaint or regret. They also confirmed the intelligence which we had
heard ere we set out, namely, that all our comrades were arrested,
except Dillon, O'Gorman, and a few others, of whose fate we remained
uncertain. Certain friends of the family undertook to communicate with
clergymen, near the seashore, who were supposed to be in a position to
facilitate our escape, while we proposed to visit Gougane Barra and
Ceimeneagh, and, if practicable, Killarney, before we returned to learn
the success of their applications. We followed the stream that passes
Dunmanway for several miles through an almost inaccessible valley,
until we reached the southwestern base of Shehigh, the highest mountain
in the range which stretches between Mallow and Cape Clear.

Here we purchased some good new potatoes, butter, eggs and milk, on
which we dined satisfactorily. We then faced the mountain which we
crossed near the summit, being desirous to gain Gougane Barra by the
shortest possible route. A steep ascent gives the traveller fresh
impulses and an irrepressible desire to bound down at the other side. It
seems to spring from that principle of action and reaction pervading all
nature. At the northern base of Shehigh, after traversing some miles of
bog, we found ourselves entering the pass of Ceimenagh. Though that Pass
had been recently immortalised in the unequalled verses of Denis
Florence M'Carthy,[12] and I had learned to love a spot where echoes of
minstrelsy so soft and passionate had found a "local habitation," I was
ignorant of its locality and entirely unprepared for the surpassing
grandeur of the scene, which, in the full blaze of a harvest moon burst
upon my view. My comrade was even more startled than I, and we paused at
every turn of that enchanting passage to gaze upon the masses of rock
projecting over our heads hundreds of feet in the air, and casting their
dark rude outlines upon the clear autumn sky. The pass is a mile long,
while in no one spot can many yards' distance be seen on either side.
The road seems to lose itself every moment in the bowels of the
mountain, but as you proceed, you find a new avenue of escape, and a
more fantastic group of impending rocks of a yet more entrancing
beauty than that you had left behind. In such a scene one could have no
feeling of weariness and no sense of fear. Neither could he doubt man's
truth any more than God's omnipotence. We ling