admiration which took instant possession of her soul. Around her, crumbled and tumbled in all directions, were hills bare indeed of trees, but green to the very summit, and strangely picturesque in the fantastic variety of their forms. There were quiet glens and solemn, rock-strewn passes, with streamlets swelled into cataracts by the rains of spring, yet looking in the distance like mere threads of liquid silver spirting from their rugged sides. There were long brown tracts of peat land, brightened and relieved by patches of golden, flowering gorse, or of that thin herbage which, in its perfectly emerald green, is only to be seen in such like boggy places; and over and above all this, there were the shadowy outlines of more than one far-off range of mountains melting into the delicate blue background of the sky, and changing color, as rapidly as the young cheek of beauty, beneath the ever-shifting lights and shadows of that "cloud scenery" which is nowhere more beautiful or varied than in Ireland. {187} To the left, and looking, in the clear atmosphere, so close that she almost felt she could have touched it with her outstretched hand, rose "Croagh Patrick," sacred to the memory of Ireland's great apostle; and Clew Bay lay, or seemed to lie, bright and shining at her feet--Clew Bay, with its gracefully winding shore, and its archipelago of islets; some bold, beetling rocks, ready and able to do battle with the storm, others mere baskets of verdure floating on the tide; while the largest and most picturesque of them all, the sea, girt kingdom of Grana-Uaile, Clare Island, stood bravely up, cliff over cliff, at the very mouth of the harbor, guarding it against the winter encroachments of the Atlantic, which, green as liquid jasper, and calm, in that summer weather, as a giant sleeping in the sunshine, unrolled itself beyond. Long and wistfully Nellie fixed her gaze upon that fair prospect; and it was with a strange reluctance and foreboding of future sorrow, that she at last withdrew in order to examine attentively that portion of the country which lay more immediately around her, and with which she believed herself about to be more intimately connected. As she did so, a building, perched half-way up a hill, rather more inland than that upon which she herself was standing, attracted her eye, and she gasped, with a sudden mingling of hope and fear, like a person choking; for she felt a sudden conviction that in the wild, uncultivated lands beneath her she beheld the portion assigned to her grandfather by the commissioners at Loughrea, and in that edifice, which seemed to have been built for the express purpose of commanding and overawing the entire district, the house in which they had told her she was to establish her new home. _House_, indeed, it could scarcely be called in anything like the modern acceptation of the term, though it was probably perfectly well suited to the wants and wishes of the wild chieftains by whom it had been erected.