The team takes us but a short distance into the gap, and we avail ourselves of animals called horses, who are ever on hand for the purpose. The guides owning them have followed us for a mile or more, in spite of our protestations, acting as though they knew we should hire their beasts, although we had with business-like earnestness told them that we thought we would walk. These animals were of a doubtful nature, that would confuse Darwin. They were either high-grade mules with short ears, or low-grade horses with long ones. We finally agreed with the owners, paying fifty cents each for the _what-is-its_, the guides engaging to take the animals back when we were done with them. Emerging from the gap we come out at the Black Valley stretching away to our left, and hemmed in, amphitheatre-like, by the base of the hills. The first view of this sombre moor reminds one of the heath-pictures in "Macbeth." Kohl says of it: "Had there been at the bottom, among the rugged masses of black rock, some smoke and flame instead of water, we might have imagined we were looking into the infernal regions." We ride down a winding road in the great amphitheatre, and along to its extremity, and are at the end of our journey with the horses; and now we are to walk a half-mile through a footpath, over fields and through pleasant groves, to the once fine garden and present ruins of Lord Brandon's Cottage. Here, we are at the upper lake; and our boatmen, by arrangement of the hostess at Innisfallen House, were there awaiting our arrival at 1 P. M. They had, as usual, gone direct from Killarney to the lower lake, and had rowed over that and the two others to this point, having made, in reversed order, the tour over the lakes we are to take. At 1.30 P. M., Thursday, April 25, we are in the row-boat with our two oarsmen, starting from the shore of the upper lake which is the smallest of the three,--a sheet of water two and a half miles long, three fourths of a mile wide, and covering 430 acres, being about two thirds as large as the middle lake, and only a little more than a twelfth as large as the lower one. And here we must say, what of choice we would not say, that in most instances, where the imagination has free play, realities do not fulfil anticipations.