On Easter Day I was picked up by the mail--the very limited mail-train at Mallow. There were few passengers in it, some half-dozen Americans and English, all told, for the "_Gallia_." The Borough, lying snugly in the wooded valley of the Blackwater, of the "Rakes" (who seem to have sown their wild oats and cut them and their sticks long ago), did not contribute so much as one spectator to the little official group--stationmaster, police, and porters--on the platform; perhaps the population generally was engulfed in the churches and chapels of the district; and the half-hour or so which sufficed to reach "the beautiful city called Cork" was passed in observation of external objects--the trout-stream; the umbrageous glens; the fields indifferently cultivated in the rare cases where they are not devoted to pasturage; the ruined abbey; the ridiculous mock Round Tower; the Hydropathic Sanitarium; the "Groves of Blarney"--chiefly of that hazy sort, where familiar scenes are associated with the dim speculation, "Shall I ever see them again?" which occupies the place of thought in the mind of people on the eve of a long expedition of this kind. It is a languid interest. But nevertheless it has its uses, which is more than can be said of the delay on the Cork platform graciously accorded to passengers ere the train starts for Queenstown. Every door is fast shut, and indeed if the observance of the Sabbath were less strict, there would not be any advantage gained by the hungry traveller, for there is only a wilderness of small shops, all closed too, in the dreary street which leads from the station of the Great Midland to the city, and there is no refreshment-room at the Cork Terminus. The directors of this well-managed line seek to combine the inculcation of temperance and the development of habits of meditation over the flight of time with the exercise of self-denial and patience. They do not allow the sale of any sort of spirits, unless they be called "port," "sherry," or "cordial," and they have a little Maine Liquor Law of their own at the railway stations. But our meditations on the Cork platform on the vanity of human wishes were at last dispelled by the ringing of the bell of the train for Queenstown, and in the prescribed time we were duly delivered over there to the "carboys" and the general outlawry of the agents of commerce who await the arrival of passengers for the States--a swarm of ragged boys with newspapers devoted to politics racy of the soil; vendors of the most primitive bouquets of heather, hollyhocks, sweet-brier, and the like; merchants with ragged and rugged sticks offered as genuine shillelaghs; women with baskets of fruit of suspicious aspect--all urged on the notice of the public with great clamour of voice. It is a quaint trade; and wonderful was it to see the number of good Americans who invested in these memorials, relics of European travel, bearing them on board the steam tender with grave solicitude.