I stopped part of a day at Mallow, an old town on the Blackwater, in one of the most fertile agricultural districts of Ireland.  The situation is fine, and an American naturally expects to see a charming rural town, planted with trees and filled with clean, comfortable homes; but he finds instead a wretched place, smitten with a plague of filth and mud, and offering but one object upon which the eye can dwell with pleasure, and that is the ruins of an old castle, “Mallow Castle over Blackwater,” which dates back to the time of Queen Elizabeth.  It stands amid noble trees on the banks of the river, and its walls, some of them thirty or forty feet high, are completely overrun with ivy.  The Blackwater, a rapid, ambercolored stream, is spanned at this point by a superb granite bridge.

And I will say here that anything like a rural town in our sense,—­a town with trees and grass and large spaces about the houses, gardens, yards, shrubbery, coolness, fragrance,—­seems unknown in England or Ireland.  The towns and villages are all remnants of feudal times, and seem to have been built with an eye to safety and compactness, or else men were more social, and loved to get closer together, then than now.  Perhaps the damp, chilly climate made them draw nearer together.  At any rate, the country towns are little cities; or rather it is as if another London had been cut up in little and big pieces and distributed over the land.

In the afternoon, to take the kinks out of my legs, and to quicken, if possible, my circulation a little, which since the passage over the Channel had felt as if it was thick and green, I walked rapidly to the top of the Knockmeledown Mountains, getting a good view of Irish fields and roads and fences as I went up, and a very wide and extensive view of the country after I had reached the summit, and improving the atmosphere of my physical tenement amazingly.  These mountains have no trees or bushes or other growth than a harsh prickly heather, about a foot high, which begins exactly at the foot of the mountain.  You are walking on smooth, fine meadow land, when you leap a fence and there is the heather.  On the highest point of this mountain, and on the highest point of all the mountains around, was a low stone mound, which I was puzzled to know the meaning of.  Standing there, the country rolled away beneath me under a cold, gray November sky, and, as was the case with the English landscape, looked singularly desolate,—­the desolation of a dearth of human homes, industrial centres, families, workers, and owners of the soil.  Few roads, scarce ever a vehicle, no barns, no groups of bright, well-ordered buildings, indeed no farms and neighborhoods and schoolhouses, but a wide spread of rich, highly cultivated country, with here and there, visible to close scrutiny, small gray stone houses with thatched roofs, the abodes of poverty and wretchedness.  A recent English writer says the first thing that struck him in American landscape-painting