Happily the curtain had not fallen before we caught a grand passing glimpse of the romantic gorge of Glen Veagh, closed and commanded in the shadowy distance by the modern castle of Glenveagh, the mountain home of my charming country-woman, Mrs. Adair.

Thanks to its irregular serpentine outline, and to the desolate majesty of the hills which environ it, Lough Veagh, though not a large sheet of water, may well be what it is reputed to be, a rival of the finest lochs in Scotland.  No traces are now discernible on its shores of the too celebrated evictions of Glen Veagh.  But from the wild and rugged aspect of the surrounding country it is probable enough that these evictions were to the evicted a blessing in disguise, and that their descendants are now enjoying, beyond the Atlantic, a measure of prosperity and of happiness which neither their own labour nor the most liberal legislation could ever have won for them here.  We caught sight, as we drove through Mrs. Adair’s wide and rocky domain, of wire fences, and I believe it is her intention to create here a small deer forest.  This ought to be as good a stalking country as the Scottish Highlands, provided the people can be got to like “stalking” stags better than landlords and agents.

Long before we reached Glen Veagh we had bidden farewell, not only to the hedges and walls of Tyrone and Eastern Donegal, but to the “ditches,” which anywhere but in Ireland would be called “embankments,” and entered upon great stone-strewn wastes of land seemingly unreclaimed and irreclaimable.  Huge boulders lay tossed and tumbled about as if they had been whirled through the air by the cyclones of some prehistoric age, and dropped at random when the wild winds wearied of the fun.  The last landmark we made out through the gathering storm was the pinnacled crest of Errigal.  Of Dunlewy, esteemed the loveliest of the Donegal lakes, we could see little or nothing as we hurried along the highway, which follows its course down to the Clady, the river of Gweedore; and we blessed the memory of Lord George Hill when suddenly turning from the wind and the rain into what seemed to be a mediaeval courtyard flanked by trees, we pulled up in the bright warm light of an open doorway, shook ourselves like Newfoundland dogs, and were welcomed by a frank, good-looking Scottish host to a glowing peat fire in this really comfortable little hotel, the central pivot of a most interesting experiment in civilisation.

GWEEDORE, Sunday, Feb. 5th.—­A morning as soft and bright almost as April succeeded the stormy night.  Errigal lifted his bold irregular outlines royally against an azure sky.  The sunshine glinted merrily on the swift waters of the Clady, which flows almost beneath our windows from Dunlewy Lough to the sea.  The birds were singing in the trees, which all about our hotel make what in the West would be called an “opening” in the wide and woodless expanse of hill and bog.