There are several drawbacks to motoring in Ireland, the chief of which is that the country is so short on good hotels and so long on showers. The next is the inability to see through or over walls of stone and hedges that rise twice as high as one's head. Nevertheless, wherever there is much to see and little time to see it in, one has to put up with some annoyances, and an automobile is no longer a luxury or a mere convenience, but an actual necessity. The Irish climate is like the Irish character. A witty native once said of his fellow countrymen, "They smile aisy and they cry aisy," and that describes the habits of the heavens also. Clouds assemble and do business in quicker time than in any other place I have ever been, but, although it will "rain cats and dogs" for fifteen or twenty minutes, the sun will be shining almost instantly afterward, as if nothing had happened. [Illustration: A CELTIC CROSS AT MONASTERBOICE, COUNTY LOUTH] Unfortunately the hotel proposition is not so easily disposed of. Most of the inns of the country districts and in the small cities are absolutely intolerable. It isn't so much because of a lack of luxuries and modern conveniences that the traveler finds in England, Scotland, and on the Continent at similar places, as it is the excess of dirt and bad smells. In the average country hotel in Ireland everything is in disorder and out of repair. The bells don't work; the furniture is crippled and decrepit; the mattresses are lumpy and half the springs are broken or out of joint; the bedrooms are seldom swept, the table cloths are seldom washed; sheets and pillow-cases, are seldom changed, and if a guest should call for a clean towel the landlord would be likely to ask what is the matter with the one he gave him a few days ago. The only alternative to stopping at a dirty hotel is to ride on until you come to a clean one, and that may be as far as the ends of the earth. The more practical, and indeed the only, way is to accept the situation good naturedly and get the best you can out of it. Any person who takes an interest in this subject can find further and accurate information in that charming book, "Penelope's Irish Experiences," by Kate Douglas Wiggin. It is asserted by those who know that there are only five good hotels in Ireland. We found nine, but did not keep count of the other kind. They are too numerous to mention. The road from Drogheda to Tara, the ancient capital of Ireland, follows the valley of the famous Boyne River, and passes through the famous battlefield where William of Orange, with thirty thousand men, in 1690, overcame James II. with twenty-three thousand, and deprived the latter of his dominion and his crown and gave the Protestants control of Ireland for the next two hundred and fifty years. A stately monument has been erected upon the field, and various small markers have been placed about to show where important incidents took place.