Another ruined tower of the time of King John stands on an island in one of these lakes.  When the Ulster settlement was made, these lands with all the countryside were held by the O’Kanes.  With the other Celtic and Catholic inhabitants, they were driven by the masterful invaders into the mountains and bogs.  There still remain their descendants, still Celtic and still Catholic, and still dreaming of the day when they shall descend into the low country and drive the Protestant Scotch and English from the “fat lands” which they occupy.  In this way the racial and religious animosities are kept alive, which have died out in Tipperary and Waterford, for example, where the Cromwellian English have become more Irish and often more Catholic than the Irish themselves.

I took a long drive and walk with Lord Ernest this afternoon through the park, which rivals Curraghmore in extent.  It is nowhere divided from the lands of the adjoining tenants, and with great liberality is thrown open to the people, not only of Newtown-Stewart and Strabane, but of all the country.  Parties, sometimes of seven hundred people, from Belfast come down to pass the day in these sylvan solitudes, and it is to be recorded to the praise of Ireland that these visitors always behave with perfect good sense and good feeling.

The “terrible trippers” of the English midlands, as I once heard an old verger in a northern Cathedral call them, who chip off relics from monuments, pull up flowers by the roots, and scatter sandwich papers and empty gingerbeer bottles broadcast over well-rolled lawns, are not known, Lord Ernest tells me, in this island.  As he neatly puts it, the Irishman, no matter what his station in life may be, or how great a blackguard he may really be, always instinctively knows when he ought to behave like a gentleman, and knows how to do so.  In the lakes were hundreds of wild fowl.  The sky was a sky of Constable—­silvery-white clouds, floating athwart a dome of clear Italian blue.  The soil here must be extraordinarily fertile.  The woods and groves are dense beyond belief.  Cut down what you like, the growth soon overtakes you, as lush almost as in the tropics.

There was a great cyclone here a year or two ago, which prostrated in a night over a hundred thousand trees.  You see the dentated gaps left by this disaster in the great circle of firs and birches on the surrounding hills, but they make hardly a serious break in the thoroughly sylvan character of the landscape.  We visited the centre of the devastation, where I found myself in what seemed to be a backwoods clearing in America.  An enterprising Scot, Kirkpatrick by name, has taken a contract under the Duke, built himself a neat wooden cabin and stables, set up a small saw-mill driven by steam, and is hard at work turning the fallen trees into timber, and making a very good thing of it, both for the Duke and for himself.  He has one or two of his own people with him, but employs the labour of the country, and has no fear of disturbance.  He thinks, however, that he must get “a good wicked dog” to frighten away the tramps, who sometimes stray into his woodland, and put the enterprise in peril by smoking and drowsing under haystacks.