Achill is virtually all one mountain which has its highest points, Slievemore and Croghaun, on the outer seaward rim and they drop almost sheer into the sea. Slieve League itself in Donegal cannot vie with the wonder of those cliffs; and the little bays of Kim and Keel on the southward, with their curve of pure sand, have a kind of daintiness of beauty most bewitching in that grim landscape. From Dugort on the north shore there is boating to be had, which in fine weather may bring you into seal-haunted caves, under cliffs where the wild goats scramble in herds; and you may see readily enough strange creatures of the deep, sunfish, huge basking sharks, with every seabird that frequents these islands. Once it was my luck to effect a landing on a flat island rock some ten miles out, called the Bills of Achill, where I suppose not once in three years man sets his foot. It was the breeding season and the birds hardly moved to let us pass: puffins sat in the quaintest droves, three or four hundred together, staring at us with parrot eyes barely out of arm's reach. I looked over a ledge of rock and saw below me a guillemot on her eggs, so near that I could touch her--and as she fluttered off, realized why these birds have an egg so big at one end that it cannot roll except round in a circle--for they are laid by two and three on a bare shelf of rock where the bird has hardly room to cover them. Only the great black-backed gulls forsook the island and their nests, soaring high into the air in hundreds where we landed, and leaving their big, ugly eggs and their big, ungainly young ones sprawling all over the turf. They are great robbers of other people's nests, worse than hawks on a grouse moor: but they provide securely for their own young, building only here and in one or two other places equally inaccessible. But for all that it may offer of wildness, of grandeur, and of interest, Achill has no charm for me. Poverty is a show there: in the village of Keel can still be seen beehive-shaped wigwams rather than houses; and it always seems as if the elements there had been too strong for man and left him huddled and cowering on the earth. Famine, or at least continuous underfeeding through generations, has helped that work. Yet the Achill folk set out hardily year by year in companies, men in their troops, girls in theirs, to field labour in different parts of Great Britain. It is thus that the population of some thousands supports itself on that barren promontory--pitifully enough, heaven knows. No doubt the sea is at their doors rich in fish; but the sea that runs off Achill Head is a very different antagonist from what men wrestle with in the English Channel.