without it. Mr. Vernon dined with us, as usual, on Christmas Day, and I was gratified to observe that even he was not altogether insensible to May's beauty. I was rather surprised to see how well they got on together.

They met constantly after that, for papa was churchwarden, and there was always some business to transact. My only brother Arthur was at home from Eton, for the holidays. He was three years younger than I-a bright, good natured boy of eighteen; of course, entertaining a large share of boyish admiration for my pretty friend, and fine fun we three had together. Arthur taught us to skate, and rode with us almost every day, in spite of the cold. He was very fond of field sports, and the long frost that winter was a great trial to his patience. At last it gave way, and so rapid a thaw succeeded, that, on the second day of it, Arthur burst into the drawing-room, with the information that "The ground would do for hunting to morrow."

"How delightful for you!" exclaimed May: "I wish I could go with you."

"Well, why not?" said Arthur; "Conrad will carry you splendidly, and I will take care of you. Do go, Miss Vivian." "It will be charming, if I may," she replied; we must ask Mr. Leslie.'

66

Mr. Vernon happened to be calling at the time. He was talking to mamma, but now looked round. "You surely do not mean to hunt, Miss Vivian?" he inquired.

"Yes, certainly, if Mr. Leslie consents," she replied. Why should I not?"

"I strongly object to ladies hunting; but, of course, that is no reason," he said, quietly, and then resumed his conversation with mamma, and shortly after took leave.

As soon as papa came in, Arthur consulted him, and obtained a ready consent, on condition that the old coachman should accompany them in the distance, of which Arthur slightly disapproved.

May tried to persuade me to go also, but I shared Mr. Vernon's prejudice; and besides, had a bad cough, which confined me to the house.

The next morning it was so much

worse that I could not leave my room. May came to wish me "Good bye!" looking charming. The riding habit and hat were most becoming to her, yet I wished she was not going; but, as she said, "If papa saw no harm, there could be none.'

We were to have a dinner party that night, but my cough was too bad for me to think of appearing, although I crept downstairs in the afternoon, to await the return of May and Arthur.

They came in good time; my brother in exuberant spirits. "Miss Vivian's riding had been the admiration of the field! She was in at the death, after a capital run."

But May stood silently; and although, on mamma expressing her fear "that she was very tired," she disowned fatigue, I felt certain one day's hunting would be enough for her.

She was very particular in her toilette that evening, and even asked me to arrange her hair, "because I always dressed it so very becomingly,"-a task I willingly fulfilled, although wondering what made her so unusually anxious to look well; and then, with many regrets that I could not accompany her, she descended to the drawing-room, and I went back to my solitude.

The party was over early, and I was still lying on my sofa, when the last car riage drove away-not being ill enough to care for bed. Almost directly after, May came into the room. She really looked pale and tired now, but inquired kindly if I had been very dull.

Oh, no!" said I, "my book has interested me. Have you had a pleasant evening, dear?"

"Everything has gone off well," she replied, evasively.

'But you have not enjoyed it. Why, May, darling, what is the matter? You are actually crying!" I exclaimed, in great surprise, seeing her eyes were full of tears.

"I am tired and stupid; that is all!" she replied, dashing them away. "I had better go to bed at once."

To this I assented, inwardly resolving that, with my consent, May should go hunting no more.

PART I.

THE Giant's Causeway! exclaims the gentle or ungentle reader; we know all that can be said about that subject; it is a dull place except to geologists.

Possibly every family in London enjoys the acquaintance of at least one individual who as ascended Mont Blanc; of two, who have penetrated the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and three, four, five, nay a dozen people, who go to Norway every year, and can speak familiarly of the Geysers of Iceland.

Every one travels now-a-days, and travellers' tales are known no more, except as fossils of literature. Every place is made so accessible, that the great sights of former times are now of no value, and there is little that is new to be seen.

An "eleven" can be found to journey 16,000 miles to play a cricket match in Australia; and there were not wanting those who hurried to the Crimea, hoping to be in time to witness the taking of Sebastopool. But where in all London is there to be found the man, who has had sufficient greatness of soul to turn his back on fogs, dirt, dull parties, indifferent suppers, dreary dinners, gas lights, and all the other belongings of winter in a great city, and give himself up to the enjoyment of winter weather on the north coast of Ireland.

A summer day at the Giant's Causeway is a dreary affair enough; when the tide of tourists is at the flood, it is as it were Punch's show at Thebes, or marionettes performing at Luxor.

Yes, dear tourist, do I not know your journey well? If you have taken a long excursion ticket, meaning to see Ireland thoroughly, you perhaps debark at Kingstown, and having "done" Dublin, Cork, and Killarney, you hurry northwards by rail. Probably you are so intent on reading your guide book, that you pass unheeding through the long and lovely vale which extends from Moira to Belfast, and is white with the snow of

commerce. But if your ticket is for a short term of days, you take steamer at Fleetwood, and, reaching Belfast early next morning, speed on to the Northern Counties Railway Station, and so find yourself at Portrush before noon.

As yet no adventures have befallen you; the train started and arrived at the hours stated in Bradshaw. The guards were civil and attentive, the change was given quickly and correctly at the ticket office. Nor did the engine driver make the slightest tempt to murder the English travellers by driving the engine at full speed over a precipice, or into a bog.

Fresh disappointments are in store. No chance of having to sleep in the open air, or in one of the stereotyped Irish cabins, where the smoke curls gracefully out of the door, and the pig occupies the place of honour, while the tattered owner of the mud erection de votes his attention chiefly to the working of an illicit still. Alas, no! No more delightful hardships. No more hairerecting adventures. Civilisation has progressed too quickly, and you are fairly cheated out of Ireland and the Irish. In vain you look for the world-famed Irish car, with its solid wooden wheels, and harness of hay ropes, driven by a tatterdemalion who eats, drinks, and sleeps with a short pipe in his mouth. It is a melancholy fact, but so it is; you are obliged to be comfortable in spite of yourself, for you are called on to choose from among vehicles of every kind that is made, from a splendid four-horse omnibus, down to a modest wheelbarrow. You have even opportunity of gratifying any favourite prepossession in horse colour.

Almost all English travellers chafe unreasonably at the difference between English time and Irish time, and yet no one demands that the clocks of Pekin or Petersburgh should strike twelve when the clock of St. Paul's proclaims the hour of noon.

"You should be obliged-yes, sir,

obliged to set your clocks by English time," said a choleric old gentleman to an Irish car driver; "Do you know, sir, that you are four-and-twenty minutes later in everything you do than we are?" "In coorse I do," replied the honest fellow, who had never had an opportunity to perturb his mind with the intricacies of latitude and longitude; "In coorse I do, shure iverybody knows that. But iverybody doesn't know that whin God made the Irish an' th' English, he foun' th' English that stupid, that he put their time more nor a quarter of an hour fast, to give them, the cratures, a bit of a start; an' if it wasn't fur that, they wudn't have a chance of keepin' up to the cliver Irish, at all, at all.”

Time later, or time earlier, as it may be, the difficulties of vehicle selection are soon over, and the perils of the road once more encountered. So do tourists, like the young woman who rejected all the easily reached straight canes in the cane-brake, and hurried on to the end, only to return with the last and worst. With the Giant's Causeway in view, tourists hurry on impatiently, and care not to give more than a passing glance to the wonderful and beautiful details of the magnificent panorama spread before them.

Even the most apathetic must look with interest on grey and lonely Dunlun Castle, standing as it does in isolated sternness on the rocky precipice. But few dwellers on terra firma, fresh from a channel passage, have their heads sufficiently steady to venture across the narrow bridge, which is the only means of communication between the castle it self and the main land.

Willis, the American traveller, wrote in his "Pencillings by the Way," of "The long, lazy swell of the Mediterranean," and for the five-and-twenty years which have elapsed since that book appeared, every one has thought it necessary to speak of the Mediterranean, and its long, lazy swell, as if the long, lazy swell belonged to the Mediterranean sea by prescriptive right, and might not, could not, would not, should not, be seen at any other time or place.

After all, the Mediterranean is only a

sea, and seas are small affairs when compared with oceans. Small people generally give themselves great airs, so that there is nothing very remarkable in a sea giving itself a great swell. But then an ocean swell-the long, lovely, and not lazy swell of the Atlantic ocean, as it laves the golden sands beneath the limestone cliffs,-must be seen from the window of Dunlun Castle to be even half understood. But then the Giant's Causeway is the goal to which all travellers are hastening, and although ardent botanists may be of the party, they are probably unaware that, by neglecting to visit Dunlun, an opportunity has been lost of securing one of the rarest and handsomest of the British wild geraniums, which flings its bright flowers there in such lavish abundance, that the trefoil carpet seems stained with Syrian purple.

No, dear tourist, you are on your way to see the world-famed Giant's Causeway; so go on your way, let nothing stop you. You arrive tired, that is unavoidable; but is a bad preparation for much bodily exertion. The sun is hot, and there is no shade-not a tree to be seen. As you toil painfully from the hotel to the Causeway itself, one foot is being cut to pieces on sharp stones, while the other foot has disappeared in an apparently bottomless pit of sand. Next step reverses the order of suffering, as the sand pits and sharp stones have changed sides of the road. Then the crowds of people are so great, you are hustled and jostled about by large crinolines, just as much as if you had nover left London. The guide points here and points there, and you strain your eyes, in the vain hope of discerning anything better worth looking at than the heaps of angled stones to which he draws your attention. The names which he rolls so volubly off his tongue are pleasant to the ear; for, being totally incomprehensible to the English understanding, they seem to give promise of the coming something so Irish or SO barbarous as to compensate for all the previous disappointments.

At last you pause, breathless and exhausted, and with difficulty contrive to keep foot-hold of the damp, slippery, un