The more enjoyable way, however, is to hire an automobile at Dublin (five guineas or $26.25 a day) and run down to Glendalough by one route, stay over night at the hotel on the lake and return the next day by another. In the meantime circle around through the country and catch its beauties as you go. The only drawback, as I have said before, is the high walls that hide the beautiful estates. These were erected, generations ago, I suppose, because the proprietors were afraid of losing their property. But notwithstanding these massive protections many an Irish estate has slipped out of the hands of its owner. It is a habit they formed about the time of the conquest and the invasion of the Normans. Some of the most beautiful and valuable property in Ireland has been lost at the gambling table or at the race course; more has been sacrificed for political partisanship and more for religious causes. In the early days kings used to have a funny way of taking a man's property from him because he didn't go to the same church and confess the same creed. Half the land in Ireland has changed owners for this reason, and some of it several times. Henry VIII., as the newspapers might say, was a prominent real estate dealer along about 1540, and Queen Elizabeth did a large business about 1584, at the time of the "flight of the earls," and nearly half the island changed hands by her majesty's grace without the payment of a dollar. When the earls who had resisted her authority ran away to France, she calmly wiped their noble names off the books of the recorder of deeds and transferred their property to English "undertakers," as they were called, because they "undertook" to drive off the rebellious Irish occupants and repopulate the land with loyal English colonists. Many of the great landlords of Ireland of to-day obtained their property and their titles at this time. And then a gentleman named Oliver Cromwell went into the real estate business over in Ireland about the middle of the seventeenth century. He drove the inhabitants of a vast area from their farms and the towns in which they lived and compelled them to take refuge in other parts of the country, while he issued scrip that could be located upon the farms they left and paid his soldiers with it because he was short of cash. Many of his soldiers remained here and married and were the ancestors of the present population. Others sold their scrip to speculators who located upon large tracts and eventually disposed of them to men who had the money.