inging these Fragments of my life and adventures before
them, is the hope of imparting to others, similarly circumstanced, a
portion of that spirit of cheerfulness, and that resolute
determination to make the most of things, which, after thirty years of
activity and enjoyment in foreign climes, have landed me in perfect
contentment at home.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] All gone since our author wrote. Now it looks for Osbornes,
Maclures, and other names as trustworthy.

CHAPTER II.

A SAILOR ON SHORE.

It is a far easier thing to get into a house in Ireland than to get
out of it again; for there is an attractive and retentive witchery
about the hospitality of the natives of that country, which has no
match, as far as I have seen, in the wide world. In other places the
people are hospitable or kind to a stranger; but in Ireland the affair
is reduced to a sort of science, and a web of attentions is flung
round the visitor before he well knows where he is: so that if he be
not a very cold-blooded or a very temperate man, it will cost him
sundry headaches--and mayhap some touches of the heartache--before he
wins his way back again to his wonted tranquillity.

I had not a single acquaintance in Ireland when first I visited that
most interesting of countries: before leaving it, however, after about
a year and a-half's cruising off and on their coasts, I was on pretty
intimate terms with one family at least for every dozen miles, from
Downpatrick on the east, to the Bloody Foreland on the west, a range
of more than a hundred and twenty miles.

The way in which this was brought about is sufficiently
characteristic of the country. I had inherited a taste for geology;
and as the north of Ireland affords a fine field for the exercise of
the hammer, I soon made myself acquainted with the Giant's Causeway,
and the other wonders of that singular district. While engaged in
these pursuits, I fell in with an eminent medical practitioner
resident in that part of the country, a gentleman well known to the
scientific world: he was still better known on the spot as the most
benevolent and kindest of men. In no part of the globe have I made a
more agreeable or useful acquaintance. During a residence of a week
under the roof of this delightful person, he frequently urged me to
make acquaintance with some friends of his, living also in the north
of Ireland, but at the opposite angle. He was, in particular, desirous
that I should see a fa