“Look! there’s Skibareen, where the worst of the famine was,” says one.

“Look! that’s a ruined Martello tower,” says another.

We new voyagers, who had never seen any ruin more imposing than that of a cow house, and, of course, were ravenous for old towers, were now quite wide awake, but were disappointed to learn that these were only custom house rendezvous.  Here is the county of Cork.  Some one calls out,—­

“There is O’Connell’s house;” and a warm dispute ensues whether a large mansion, with a stone chapel by it, answers to that name.  At all events the region looks desolate enough, and they say the natives of it are almost savages.  A passenger remarks, that “O’Connell never really did any thing for the Irish, but lived on his capacity for exciting their enthusiasm.”  Thereupon another expresses great contempt for the Irish who could be so taken in.  Nevertheless, the capability of a disinterested enthusiasm is, on the whole, a nobler property of a human being than a shrewd self-interest.  I like the Irish all the better for it.

Now we pass Kinsale lighthouse; there is the spot where the Albion was wrecked.  It is a bare, frowning cliff, with walls of rock rising perpendicularly out of the sea.  Now, to be sure, the sea smiles and sparkles around the base of it, as gently as if it never could storm; yet under other skies, and with a fierce south-east wind, how the waves would pour in here!  Woe then to the distressed and rudderless vessel that drifts towards those fatal rocks!  This gives the outmost and boldest view of the point.

[Illustration:  View East of Kinsale.]

The Albion struck just round the left of the point, where the rock rises perpendicularly out of the sea.  I well remember, when a child, of the newspapers being filled with the dreadful story of the wreck of the ship Albion—­how for hours, rudderless and helpless, they saw themselves driving with inevitable certainty against these pitiless rocks; and how, in the last struggle, one human being after another was dashed against them in helpless agony.

What an infinite deal of misery results from man’s helplessness and ignorance and nature’s inflexibility in this one matter of crossing the ocean!  What agonies of prayer there were during all the long hours that this ship was driving straight on to these fatal rocks, all to no purpose!  It struck and crushed just the same.  Surely, without the revelation of God in Jesus, who could believe in the divine goodness?  I do not wonder the old Greeks so often spoke of their gods as cruel, and believed the universe was governed by a remorseless and inexorable fate.  Who would come to any other conclusion, except from the pages of the Bible?

But we have sailed far past Kinsale point.  Now blue and shadowy loom up the distant form of the Youghal Mountains, (pronounced Yoole.) The surface of the water is alive with fishing boats, spreading their white wings and skimming about like so many moth millers.