Navan, a neat little manufacturing town with a woolen mill and other industries, has a reasonably good hotel, but you have to come back about ten miles from Kells. There is another neat little town called Trim, where it is possible to stay overnight and even to pass a day or two. The country around Trim is lovely. The landscapes in every direction would fascinate an artist, and the ruins of "King John's Castle," built on the banks of the Boyne by Hugh de Lacy, are among the most extensive and beautiful in the world. The walls, four hundred and eighty-six yards long, with ten circular towers at nearly equal distances, are still well preserved and there is a lofty keep, seventy feet high, with beautiful turrets and flanked on either side with rectangular towers. There is nothing to surpass it in Ireland for picturesqueness, and its associations give it additional interest, for King John, Edward II., Richard, Earl of Ulster, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and other famous characters, have lived there. Henry of Lancaster, afterward Henry IV. of England, was imprisoned there; the parliament of Ireland met within its walls, year after year, and it was once the mint of the kingdom. In later days it was occupied by the Duke of Wellington, who received his early education in the diocesan school within the grounds. His name, you know, was Arthur Wellesley. He was a son of Lord Mornington, of an old Irish family. His mother was a daughter of the Earl of Dungannon of Tyrone, and she lived to see four of her sons elevated to the peerage of Great Britain, not because of wealth or political influence, but because of their ability and usefulness. Richard, the eldest, was that celebrated statesman, the Marquis of Wellesley; the second, William, was also eminent in politics and civil affairs as Lord Mayborough; the third, Henry, Lord Crowley, spent his life in the diplomatic service and made an enviable name, while Arthur, hero of Waterloo and of the Spanish campaign, the man who broke the back of Napoleon the Great, was the fourth and most famous of them all. Arthur Wellesley was born May 1, 1769, in Merrion Street, Dublin, in a house now occupied by the commissioners that are carrying out the land act, and he died Sept. 18, 1852. It may be said that no other Irish subject of a British king ever received greater honors or better deserved them. Dungan Castle, the home of the Wellesleys, is near Trim, about twenty miles from Dublin, and the nearest railway station is Summer Hill. Laracor, a secluded little village where Dean Swift was once curate and where Stella lived with Mrs. Dingley, is only a mile or two distant. XII TARA--THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF IRELAND