FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 248 



on the banks of the river, and its walls, some of them 

 thirty or forty feet high, are completely overrun with 

 ivy. The Blackwater, a rapid, amber-colored stream, 

 is spanned at this point by a superb granite bridge. 



And I will say here that anything like a rural town 

 in our sense, a town with trees and grass and large 

 spaces about the houses, gardens, yards, shrubbery, 

 coolness, fragrance, etc., seems unknown in England 

 or Ireland. The towns and villages are all remnants 

 of feudal times, and seem to have been built with an 

 eye to safety and compactness, or else men were more 

 social and loved to get closer together then than now. 

 Perhaps the damp, chilly climate made them draw 

 nearer together. At any rate, the country towns are 

 little cities ; or rather it is as if another London had 

 been cut up in little and big pieces and distributed 

 over the land. 



In the afternoon, to take the kinks out of my legs, 

 and quicken if possible my circulation a little, which 

 since the passage over the Channel had felt as if it was 

 thick and green, I walked rapidly to the top of the 

 Kockmeledown Mountains, getting a good view of 

 Irish fields and roads and fences as I went up, and a 

 very wide and extensive view of the country after I 

 had reached the summit, and improving the atmos- 

 phere of my physical tenement amazingly. These 

 mountains have no trees or bushes or other growth 

 than a harsh prickly heather, about a foot high, 

 which begins exactly at the foot of the mountain. 

 You are walking on smooth, fine meadow land, when 



