1 88 By Stream and Sea. 



make the harbour of Portrush, tossed uneasily at anchor 

 under the lee of the Skerries. 



The long line of rocky islets, which for centuries has 

 stood firm as an advance guard to receive the first shock of 

 the ocean's bombardment, lay quiet one day basking like 

 Brobdingnagian seals in a calm sea; on the next day the mad 

 billows leapt at a bound over them into the gorges and 

 creeks and subterranean waterways and caves, the foam 

 whirling into the interior, and whitening the green downs as 

 if with snow-flakes. To reach the cliffs, from which alone 

 on such a day the choicest portion of Causeway scenery can 

 be commanded, could only be achieved by the hale and 

 hearty ; indeed, it could only be done at all by leaning 

 down, as it were upon the gale, until your body represented 

 the steep roof of a house, and you could walk in a position 

 which the human form could never maintain unless breasted 

 by such an unwonted support. Yet but a few hours ago we 

 could enter Dunkerry Cave, seven hundred feet long, on the 

 glassy water-floor. 



The Causeway itself, or rather the three Causeways in- 

 cluded in the general term, is not the only, nor to some 

 minds the most interesting, feature of the neighbourhood. 

 There is the coast from Dunluce Castle, a rare old romantic 

 pile of ruins, perched on the top of an isolated rock, which 

 must have been as impregnable as the Eagle's Eyrie, far 

 back into the centuries when the McQuillans and the 

 McDonnells of the Isles defied the world from its battle- 

 ments. The coast from this prominent precipice to Fair- 

 head, some twenty miles eastward, is a succession of caves, 

 crags, and cliffs, far or near, and the scenery is most strik- 

 ing. People, however, naturally begin with the Causeway. 

 As its name suggests, it is a huge projection, long and wide, 

 into the sea. Of course it has a history — what is there in 



