Beauty of this kind stretches away from Dublin north and west over the broad fertile plain of Fingal, the territory of the "White Strangers", the fair-haired Norsemen. You can find such beauty, with scenic accessories, in the famous Phoenix Park--so called by corruption of the Gaelic name given to a well there, _Fionn Uisge_, the Bright Water. The wide expanse of the park has lovely glades, deer-haunted like the one which Mr. Williams has pictured; it has backgrounds of mountain, the Dublin hills looming up to the south; it has foregrounds of cricket matches, or, better still, of hurling. Hurley is the most picturesque game I have ever seen played, except polo; and polo, too, in the summer, you can watch in the Phoenix at its very best, though the splendid ground is less beautiful than it was before the great "February storm" of 1903 swept down the long line of elms which bordered it. Still, in "horseshow week", when the cup matches are on, all the world can go and see, "free, gracious, and for nothing", one of the finest spectacles that modern civilization can afford. [Illustration: A HAWTHORN GLADE, PHOENIX PARK] Skirting the park to the south, and trending westward, is the valley of the Liffey, and no one looking at the unsightly, sometimes unsavoury, stream which divides Dublin would guess at the beautiful water which the Liffey-bred salmon reaches in a couple of miles after he has left the sea. Mr. Williams has drawn a reach of it, still in the tidal limit, at Palmerston, halfway to Leixlip--that is Salmon Leap: the Norse name tells its story of the city's founding. The picture shows the steep wood leading up to green expanses of the park on the south side; and in the gap seaward, all the vague expanse of brick and stone. Within an easy ride from the park--how often Swift rode it!--is the village of Celbridge, where his "Vanessa", Esther Vanhomrigh, settled herself to be near the man she loved so fatally. The Liffey where it borders Vanessa's Marley Abbey, and lower down, where it skirts Castletown demesne, may challenge comparison for beauty with any of Ireland's rivers. By its bank famous men grew up--Charles, George, and William Napier, sons of the beautiful Lady Sarah Lennox; nephews, therefore, of Lady Louisa Connolly, whose husband then owned Castletown, and first cousins of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, whose home was near by, at Carton, the seat of his father the Duke of Leinster. The conqueror of Sind and the historian of the Peninsular War got their schooling in Celbridge. They formed in their school a class of boy scouts against the troublous days of the "Ninety-Eight" rising; and yet their sympathies were largely with their cousin, Lord Edward, most picturesque among its leaders.