The time for visiting Muckross Abbey is most auspicious, the sun being still above the horizon; and the approaching tranquillity befits a trip of the kind. The ruins we have before inspected have been castles, or fort-like structures, designed as a home for some royal family, yet sufficiently strong and impregnable to ward off the attacks of a formidable enemy. What we are now to see is not a place designed for ease, comfort, and defence against ill conditions in this life, but rather to ensure pleasure and safety in the life to come. The spot is about five miles from Killarney, and owned by Mr. Herbert, a gentleman held in the highest esteem by rich and poor. There is a neat gate-lodge, beyond which the visitor finds gratuitous admission at any hour before 6 P. M.; after that, and properly enough, a shilling is due to the gatekeeper. Our team left outside the gate, we pass through a grand avenue, and soon opens to view one of the finest and most enchanting mediæval ruins to be found in Ireland,--exquisitely interesting in every part, and beyond the power of any one to adequately describe. The ruins are on a large knoll, surrounded by trees, conspicuous among which is the yew. These trees are formed much like large cedars, and resemble them in general outline; but the foliage is dark-green, so dark as at first sight to appear almost black. The branches are very large, and spread out into flat or fanlike masses, to near the ground. The abbey was founded in 1140, and is now 742 years old. As we examine it, and more especially an ancient yew-tree, surrounded by the cloisters, known to have been there for more than 600 years, we are deeply impressed with the thought that we are communing with things relating to long past generations. It had its last repairs in 1602, was soon after abandoned, and is now without a roof, but is otherwise in good preservation. The ruins are very large and varied. They consist of both an abbey and a church. The cloisters belong to the former, and form a stone colonnade, some ten feet wide, connected by the arches with the open-to-the-sky area, some seventy-five feet square, in the centre of which stands the venerable yew already mentioned. In the retirement and obscurity of these cloisters, walked and meditated and prayed hundreds,--and in the large aggregate of years it may be thousands,--to whom no other spot on the broad earth was, in their judgment, so good and befitting for their pious purpose. Here for centuries piety intensified, was transformed into superstition, germinated, blossomed, and fruited.