194 By Stream and Sea. 



You may have your fill of the Lough, visit the ruins, and 

 at night find comfortable quarters at a modest hostelry 

 where a waiter in greasy black, and clouded white necktie 

 was never seen ; but where you may take your ease in a 

 solidly comfortable way that smacks of the olden times. 

 The sound of water greets you in Antrim town, and under 

 an ancient bridge rushes the very ideal of a trout and 

 salmon stream. The river is known as Six-Mile Water, 

 so-called apparently because it rises in the hills something 

 between nine and twelve miles from its entrance to Lough 

 Neagh. Alas ! through the progress of commerce and 

 manufacture, the Six-Mile Water has been ruined by the 

 mills up stream, and, as a favourite haunt of the finest 

 salmon and trout, its glory has long since departed. Not 

 many weeks ago the fish for miles — such few fish as were 

 left — were borne down from the other manufactories on a 

 current black as tar, and quite as unsavoury, dead and 

 dying. The voracious pike and tempting trout floated in 

 peace together, and as proof, if any were wanted, of 

 the poisonous ingredients which had wrought all the mis- 

 chief, even the eels, which do not generally stick at a trifle, 

 but prefer a half-decayed corpse to any other seasonable 

 delicacy, passed by limp and lifeless in the melancholy 

 procession ; and yet a worthy youth, in that half Irish, half 

 Scotch tone which you expect in Ulster, tells us that he can 

 remember shovelling the trout out of the still pools by the 

 barrow-load. 



On your way to the Lough, which is but a pleasant walk 

 from the town, you pass a well-built mansion, Antrim Castle- 

 The' gardens and grounds, laid out in the Louis Quinze 

 style, are reputed the finest in the province, and they must 

 be indeed fine which surpass them. There are thick woods 

 and an abundance of game hereabouts. Here, even within 



