What lies behind all this, who knows exactly? but certainly those dwellers on the outermost verge of Europe always had vague yet glorious rumours of a land beyond the sea--a land in truth whose flotsam and jetsam, strange nuts and weeds, the ocean current casts from time to time on their shores. And heaven knows, that this Western people, since Columbus brought promise into fulfilment and imagining into sure knowledge, have found in the west there a haven, a refuge from the miseries into which they were born. America has been a strange and often a sinister realization of the Fortunate Islands--yet conceive of Ireland's history for the past century without America to lean on, to look to for help. Its streets have not been paved with gold, no easily-won sustenance has been there: yet to the fisher folk and farmers it has offered the fulfilment of desire, the enlargement of aspiration; and the course that St. Brendan first charted, though it is more frequented now than could be wished, though it leads often enough to unhappy wreckage, has yet been to Ireland a blessed road. [Illustration: HOLY ISLAND, LOUGH DERG] No man who visits this Atlantic seaboard of Ireland but must feel something of what Archbishop Healy's eloquence hints at--the sense of an open gateway beyond the sun-track through which imagination is beckoned towards its own goal. There is a soothing and restful influence from those vast spaces of the west. And even landward it follows you. We crossed the neck of the Dingle Peninsula to the pretty and prosperous town of Tralee, and all eastern Kerry merging into Limerick stretched away to right of us, a wide rolling expanse of land well divided into fields for tillage. Our course lay still on north-east to Listowel, crossing the tract of land which divides Tralee Bay from the Shannon's broad estuary; all about us, the country was spacious, yet well inhabited, set thick with trim little farmhouses: there was much traffic on the roads, of horse and man--and of asses: I saw there what is not common, two donkeys driven abreast in a little cart, stepping very smart down a long hill. There was plenty of room for the people, yet the people were there--on the land, living by the land, with the large air of the Atlantic blowing in across them. Next day, since the trains were not running, we had to proceed by motor to Limerick, and we simply ran north to the Shannon shore at Tarbert and followed the river to Limerick for a matter of forty miles, stretch by stretch, a broad sea lane for vessels, but alas! no vessels there: hardly a sail on the waters; though battleships can lie at Foynes, thirty miles in from Loop Head.