The strand, at the point of Magilligan, is low and sandy, from high to low water-mark extending to half a mile; the tide was quarter-flood, and never was a mirror more transparent than its surface. Presently, and rushing along the shore, a curious and indescribable movement was visible on the face of the water; a darkness appeared underneath, and a strange rippling broke and bubbled the surface for some three-hundred yards. By the Lord!" exclaimed the oldest of the boatmen, "here come the horse-mackarel!"

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The rush passed on-the net directly crossing the centre of the column-and when the drag-rope was brought on shore, our united power could hardly move it. It was quite evident that the number of the enclosed was legion, and that great caution to bring them in would be required; or, from their own density and weight, the captured mackarel would break bodily through the net, and effect a general deliverance. While slowly we got the net ashore-for we neither had the power, nor dare we, in prudence, to expedite the operation-we saw thousands extricate themselves and get away. At last we got the net into halffathom water, and from one extremity to the other it was literally bellied out like a porter-barrel. Once landed on the sand, we were unable to bring it further; and, taking the water, we endeavoured to roll it in before us; this clumsy but necessary proceeding enabled thousands to escape, for we found them striking against our legs by dozens. At last we rolled ashore probably not a fourth of those originally impounded. Some cadgers who were awaiting the arrival of the turbot-boats from Innisterhull came down the beach timously to our assistance, bringing their fish-cart with them. Eight times we half filled it, and the mackarel were thrown in a heap beyond the tide's reach. The quantity when collected was marvellous, and the next question was touching their disposal. I waived all claim upon the property, and a bargain was promptly completed. The boat's crew and artillery-men received £2 each from the fish carriers, and all were gainers but my friend, who was minus a pair of boots-French polish has but a poor chance against salt water. The artillerists returned rejoicing to their tower-the boatmen rowed us over, and then adjourned to Phil. Dogerty's public-houseCaptain M. and I exchanged wet clothes for dry ones, and over a grilled chicken and a fair allowance of "brandy without," discussed the adventure of the evening. For twenty miles, and up both shores of Lough Foil, the tidings travelled, and the marvellous draught of mackarel occupied general attention. The outline of the exploit was correctly reported; but touching the extent of it, common fame was a little incorrect. The half cart-loads were altered into whole ones, and a unit prefixed before the "eight." Well, eighteen carts of fish reads better, particularly when they were stated to be well filled.

* Innisterhull, is a rocky islet off Lough Swilly, with a light-house; there is a magnificent turbot-bank immediately beside it.

I have before recommended that you should allow your hounds to find their own live game, and I now also advise you to grant them the same favour when it is killed. Let them hunt quietly up to their quarry, without picking without picking it up until their arrival. If you remove it, they will naturally fling and fly about, trying to recover the lost scent; and as a rabbit is not a woodcock, a little mumbling will do it no harm, and it pleases the hounds amazingly. I love to see half-a-dozen of them pulling at him en moulinet. It also increases their love of the gun when its report is immediately followed by such enjoyment. Use your best endeavours to get your team even in pace: you must not expect to see them pushing for the lead, and carrying a head. All hounds, except fox-hounds, invariably string; and this is one objection to hare-hunting. Modern harriers, I grant, are free from this fault; but what are they but dwarf fox-hounds? If, however, you have one beagle slower than the rest, he will not be long before he learns by cunning to make up for his lack of speed, and will, whenever he can, go away with a scent without saying a word about it until he has secured a pretty good start. This is an unpardonable and incorrigible fault. Draft him forthwith, or he will soon throw up the noses of his brethren. If your hedgerows are very long and wide, it will materially assist your sport to take out a couple of boys, one of whom is to be stuck in a thin place behind the hounds, the other before. As the cry approaches him, let the boy rattle the underwood, and the rabbit must perforce bolt at one side or the other, where the guns will be stationed. If you neglect this precaution, they will, in chasing one rabbit, disturb half-a-dozen; and covert sufficient for a morning's sport will not last you for an hour. Do not stand too wide of the hedge, so as to fire into it. I have seen more accidents occur from this cause than from any other; and everybody is tempted to do so, for the sake of getting a broadside shot in preference to a stem or stern one. Boys are generally entered at rabbits, and I think imprudently. The odds in favour of a pointer and against beagles are about eight to one, independently of the shots with the latter being at ground-game instead of at flying, which, again, increases the hazard. I myself, throughout the Christmas holidays, always long for a pair of bomb-proof trousers, especially during the ricochets of a hard frost. If, by ill luck, you find yourself obliged to try a large covert, "pound" it off with nets; but let your nets be strained tight and pegged down to the ground. If you leave them slack, rabbit, hounds, and all will occasionally roll head-over-heels into them, and tear

considered strictly confidential-observed a change in my manner, and at times a wildness of the eye; if I were not actually mad, I was some marches in advance towards it; as a physician, he had detected incipient symptoms-but conduct was even surer proof than diagnostics, for would any man of sound mind settle down in a place two-and-twenty miles from a post-office, and thirty from any medical practitioner who could produce a diploma? This reasoning was conclusive, and a general verdict was delivered, that although I had not exactly committed any overt act that would warrant a strait-waistcoat, yet the existence of" rats in my garret" was indisputable.

And yet I was not mad—or, if I were, there was a method in it. Jack Falstaff says that "every man knows best how to buckle his own belt," and I fancied that in the wilds of Erris I should find a solitary kind of happiness, that, to a mind and habits such as mine were, would be germane, albeit caviare to the multitude. I made the experiment, and the result proved that I was right.

The greater portion of two happy years I passed in Ballycroy; and were life young, and local circumstances as they then were, I would joyfully adopt the same resting-place again.

I shall briefly familiarize the reader with the head-quarters from which some of my future despatches shall be dated. I have already said that the next market-town was distant twenty miles, and when I remind him that these miles were Irish measure he may account it close upon thirty; such was the actual distance from the next post-office, and -thank God!-the nearest doctor was ten miles further off.

In architectural design, no builder of a cottage ornée would take Aughniss as a model. What its original extent might have been was merely conjectural; for it so happened that divers had been its occupants, and it had never had a tenant who did not, for fancy or convenience, add a room or two to the lodge. I was no exception. To one extremity I appended a sort of dairy, and to the other a barrack-room for such wanderers as, by prescriptive custom, dropped in without ceremony, and required hospitality as a right. A rude stable, a small kennel, and a store-house for curing salmon, completed the establishment. There was grass land for a couple of hacks and as many cows, and a garden that produced coarse vegetables. The scenery was an unvarying extent of bog, water, and mountain; when the tide was out we looked upon an estuary of dry sand, and when in, we were insulated for an hour or two, and our peninsula made an island.

A short detail of our mode of life will not be uninteresting to those who have never visited that corner of the earth beyond the Shannon, irreligiously associated with the place we never name, and been resident in the very wildest of its wild localities. On our own resources we were totally dependent; for there, if a gentleman drops in unexpectedly, you cannot send to the next butcher's shop for a leg of mutton, the messenger being obliged to cover some sixty English miles in his expedition back and forward. Our luxuries were obtained from Galway; and when we moved from winter quarters in March, a supply was laid in calculated to last until the middle of the next November. Of salted meats an adequate quantity for garrison expenditure was provided; of poultry, eggs, and butter, we had, within ourselves, what a doctor would write "quantum suf. ;" when mutton was required, a prime five-year-old was to be

had for ten shillings, a fat kid for half-a-crown, and half-a-dozen chickens for eighteen-pence; the cook had merely to step into the fishstore for a salmon when she wanted one, and a couple of boatmen would raise more oysters with the dredge in half an hour, than would meet the consumption of a week. Our fuel was dried peats and bog timber; and these, of domestic necessaries, were cheaper than all beside, with a solitary exception, and that was poteeine whisky. One article in household economy was pre-eminently good; our bread was remarkable for its purity and whiteness, the flour being obtained from Galway, and the barm from one of the dozen illicit distilleries whose smoke you could see curling over the surface in every direction where there happened to be a rivulet.

Of the quality of that staple article manufactured in Ballycroy, it will be enough to say that a poteeine-fancier would undertake a pilgrimage for a keg-full. For years after I left that land of Goshen I forswore all parliamentary productions-for more exquisite whisky never delectated the wearied traveller or tired grouse-shooter than Erris then produced, and at the price-incomprehensible to an English reader-viz., about four shillings a gallon. The recital of these statistics may seem tiresome, but they are true. There were, however, some local drawbacks; water must be carried from a distance; and, strange as the statement will appear, while the bay of Dhuhooma was full of deep-sea fish, and the estuary before my windows breaking now and then with millions of migratory ones, did I want a cod or haddock, I had to send a special messenger to Castlebar-inland distance, thirty miles-to obtain it.

I may mention here that the fish indigenous to the coast were chiefly cod, haddock, ling, skate, and every variety of flat-fish; and to the migratory, I have alluded en passant. Touching salmon (hybrids, so far as salt and fresh elements are concerned), we will more particularly pay our future attention; but in this article we shall confine ourselves to some remarks upon those supplies which nature bountifully pours upon the western coast of Ireland, while man as stupidly declines availing himself of the boon.

I

Of migratory sea fish, the herring is the most important one, and were the western coast fished properly, the average returns would be most remunerating. But there, God's bounty is thrown away, and herrings come, and herrings go, and their march is seldom much molested. disclaim politics, but I cannot pass by facts; the curse of the sea-coast population is their insensate attention to saints and holy days-a clear loss of twenty per cent. in time's calculations, were the annual amount of this nuisance correctly counted up.

as

When I was located in Ballycroy, there was a wretched clachan, they call half-a-dozen cabins in the Highlands, across the neck of land where the lodge stood, and opening on the other estuary (Goolamore). The potatoes were in blossom-and the advent of the herrings is supposed to be generally a concurrent event. I walked across the bit of beach, and came to announce to the neighbouring villagers, that to the. northward, the advanced guard of the herrings had appeared. Would it not be supposed in England that I should have proved a welcome visitor?

*The whisky which pays duty in Ireland is termed "Parliament.”

them to pieces; whereas the "taut" net will turn them as effectually as a brick wall. But this is poor fun; and you might have as good sport in shooting rats crawling about a pig-stye. A rabbit creeping through brambles, or sitting up to listen, is ignobly slain; and you had better make over this necessary and unavoidable day's destruction to your tenants and tradesmen, whose sons and apprentices will there succeed far better than in the quicker evolutions of hedge-rows or gorse-patches. With regard to shooting hares with rabbit-beagles, you must, if you allow it, make up your mind to their occasionally breaking bounds; and it is sometimes difficult to stop them, with a good scent. A hare is vastly tempting and sweet in their noses; and do not secure her at her first start, you must either flog off as best you may, or wait patiently in her foil until her return. As I do not approve either alternative, I stop mine immediately. My old hounds know this so well, that they will stand and look at her as she canters across the open, and wag their sterns, saying, as plainly as eyes can speak," Joy go with you!" Many old beagles will stoop to the scent of a wounded bird or pheasant as closely as a retriever, and I have seldom found myself without one or two of this kind, so useful for the pot; but I do not by any means recommend frequent égaremens of this sort, for, recollect, with every kind of dog, everything except their real legitimate game causes riot.

if

you

If, by good or bad luck, you should happen, like myself, to possess a poor sandy pasture-field, hungry and barren, surrounded by woods, far removed from the influence of the farm-yard, and requiring the fee-simple of the land to be laid out upon it to enable it to feed a sheep per acre, convert it into a gorse-covert, leaving each sixth land unsown. You will cut one-third of the furzes every year at right angles to the permanent roads; and this, with a gun at each corner of each square, will supply a morning's sport worth enjoying. Stick your soi-disant huntsman in the centre of the square, and blaze away, keeping one warning in mind-namely, not to shoot till the rabbit fairly crosses. He will often skirt the furze, and pop in again; and in that case, if you shoot, your opposite neighbour's shins or a stray hound will be in some peril.

Such a covert as this will also render you not very unpopular with your nearest master of fox-hounds. Ah, once again, merry days! merry days! The very last run which a highly-valued friend of mine ever witnessed took place from a covert closely resembling that which I have here described. Then, Lady! dear, game old Lady! thou who hadst gone over Leicestershire, steered by Frank Grant, and hadst descended in the vale of years to thy then-owner! thou who hadst provoked the Muse to celebrate thee in strains from which Tom Moore has borrowed one of his sweetest ballads!·

"Say what shall be our sport to-day?

There's nothing, with deer or fox or hare,
Too broad, too high, too fast, too gay
For the spirit of my old mare!"

wast stripped of trappings unworthy of thee, and for the last time. felt the racing-snaffle and the pigskin. Whether thou hadst two, three, or four shoes on, I recollect not, nor doth it matter. Gods!