anding right above me. It was
not plain in such darkness how we should get to the end of our
ten-mile journey; but one of the young men borrowed a lantern from
a chandler in the bottom of the town, and we made our way over the
bridge and up the hill, going slowly and painfully with just light
enough, when we kept close together, to avoid the sloughs of water
and piles of stones on the roadway. By the time we reached the top
of the ridge and began to work down carefully towards Smerwick, the
rain stopped, and we reached the village without any mishap.

I go out often in the mornings to the site of Sybil Ferriter's
Castle, on a little headland reached by a narrow strip of rocks. As
I lie there I can watch whole flights of cormorants and choughs and
seagulls that fly about under the cliffs, and beyond them a number
of niavogues that are nearly always fishing in Ferriter's Cove.
Further on there are Sybil Head and three rocky points, the Three
Sisters then Smerwick Harbour and Brandon far away, usually covered
with white airy clouds. Between these headlands and the village
there is a strip of sandhill grown over with sea-holly, and a low
beach where scores of red bullocks lie close to the sea, or wade in
above their knees. Further on one passes peculiar horseshoe coves,
with contorted lines of sandstone on one side and slaty blue rocks
on the other, and necks of transparent sea of wonderful blueness
between them.

I walked up this morning along the slope from the east to the top of
Sybil Head, where one comes out suddenly on the brow of a cliff with
a straight fall of many hundred feet into the sea. It is a place of
indescribable grandeur, where one can see Carrantuohill and the
Skelligs and Loop Head and the full sweep of the Atlantic, and, over
all, the wonderfully tender and searching light that is seen only in
Kerry. Looking down the drop of five or six hundred feet, the height
is so great that the gannets flying close over the sea look like
white butterflies, and the choughs like flies fluttering behind
them. One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or
London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live
in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe
this wonderful air, which is like wine in one's teeth.

Here and there on this headland there are little villages of ten or
twenty houses, closely packed together without any order or roadway.
Usually there are one or