The drive from Youghal to Lismore along the Blackwater, begins, continues, and ends in beauty.  In the summer a steamer makes the trip by the river, and it must be as charming in its way as the ascent of the Dart from Dartmouth to Totness, or of the Eance from Dinard to St. Suliac.  My jarvey was rather a taciturn fellow, but by no means insensible to the charms of his native region.  About the Ponsonby estate and its troubles he said very little, but that little was not entirely in keeping with what I had heard at Youghal.  “It was an old place, and there was no grand house on it.  But the landlord was a kind-man.”  “Father Keller was a good man too.  It was a great pity the people couldn’t be on their farms; and there was land that was taken on the hills.  It was a great pity.  The people came from all parts to see the Blackwater and Lismore; and there was money going.”  “Yes, he would be glad to see it all quiet again.  Ah yes! that was a most beautiful place there just running out into the Blackwater.  It was a gentleman owned it; he lived there a good deal, and he fished.  Ah! there’s no such river in the whole world for salmon as the Blackwater; indeed, there is not!  Everything was better when he was a lad.  There was more money going, and less talking.  Father Keller was a very good man; but he was a new man, and came to Youghal from Queenstown.”

We passed on our way the ruins of Dromaneen Castle, the birthplace of the lively old Countess of Desmond, who lies buried at Youghal.  Here, too, according to a local tradition, she met her death, having climbed too high into a famous cherry-tree at Affane, near Dromaneen, planted there by Sir Walter Raleigh, who first introduced this fruit, as well as the tobacco plant and the potato, into Ireland.  At Cappoquin, which stands beautifully on the river, I should have been glad to halt for the night, in order to visit the Trappist Monastery there, an offshoot of La Meilleraye, planted, I think, by some monks from Santa Susanna, of Lulworth, after Charles X. took refuge in the secluded and beautiful home of the Welds.  The schools of this monastery have been a benediction to all this part of Ireland for more than half a century.

Lismore has nothing now to show of its ancient importance save its castle and its cathedral, both of them absolutely modern!  A hundred years ago the castle was simply a ruin overhanging the river.  It then belonged to the fifth Duke of Devonshire, who had inherited it from his mother, the only child and heiress of the friend of Pope, Richard, fourth Earl of Cork, and third Earl of Burlington.  It had come into the hands of the Boyles by purchase from Sir Walter Ealeigh, to whom Elizabeth had granted it, with all its appendages and appurtenances.  The fifth Duke of Devonshire, who was the husband of Coleridge’s “lady nursed in pomp and pleasure,” did little or nothing, I believe, to restore the vanished glories of Lismore; and the castle, as it now exists,