have come, it may be, from France, from Hungary, from the Western States of America, from heaven knows where, to pursue this long-neglected but now eagerly followed branch of learning. And you may hear, and perhaps see, how with the study pleasant festivities interweave themselves of an evening, dances, jigs, reels, hornpipes, and the rest--or simply the _céilidhe_, a gathering for talk and story-telling round the fire. From Tourmakeady, I would have you proceed by boat, crossing the lake to Ballinrobe, and seeing on your way _Caisleán na Caillidhe_, Hag's Castle, a very early example of the fortifications which Irish chiefs began to build when they had learnt from the Normans how much stronger were stone walls than earthen ramparts. Yet here the stone wall is on the model of an earthen dun, built circular, and of no great height--an enclosure for defence rather than a dwelling place--doubly defended too, for it stands on an island near to the Ballinrobe shore. As you drive from Ballinrobe to Cong, you shall see on your left a huge cairn of stones crowning a low height. This is an outlying monument of that famous battle of Moytura, fought, it is said, between the legendary Tuatha de Danann, warrior demigods, against those older inhabitants of Ireland, Firbolgs, men of the leathern wallet. Who fought that fight, when they fought it, is obscure, but fought it was, and the cairns rise thick over the battlefield, a couple of miles behind Cong. All this lore was studied out and set down by the notable father of a still more celebrated son. Oscar Wilde must have spent no small part of his boyhood at Moytura House where his father, Sir William Wilde, passed what holidays a great surgeon could secure, and where he wrote his _Antiquities of Lough Corrib_. There is another legendary battlefield in Sligo called the northern Moytura, which tradition identifies with the site of a second and final battle in which the De Danann defeated the men of the wallet, and it is marked by the same profusion of cairns and stone circles--which, it must be allowed, can be constructed with less labour in the west of Ireland than elsewhere, because the whole surface of the ground is covered with the material for them. Yet assuredly some great event must be marked by monuments so laborious: though I find their associations a trifle too shadowy for interest.