upward in the direction where I lay. I watched the old man toiling up the steep, and as he drew nigh, hailed him, as I could not suffer him to pass without learning at least the name, if it had one, of this miniature Amhara. He readily complied, and placing his fish-basket on the ground, seated himself beside it, not unwilling to recover his breath and recruit his scanty stock of strength almost expended in the ascent. “We call it,” said he in answer to my query, “the Lake of the Ruin, or sometimes, to such as know the story, the Lake of the Lovers, after the two over whom the tombstone is placed inside yon mouldering walls. It is an old story. My grandfather told me, when a child, that he minded his grandfather telling it to him, and for anything he could say, it might have come down much farther. Had I time, I’d be proud to tell it to your honour, who seems a stranger in these parts, for it’s not over long; but I have to go to the Hall, and that’s five long miles off, with my fish for dinner, and little time you’ll say I have to spare, though it be down hill nearly all the way.” It would have been too bad to allow such a well-met chronicler to pass unpumped, and, putting more faith in the attractions of my pocket than of my person, I produced on the instant my luncheon-case and flask, and handing him a handsome half of the contents of the former, made pretty sure of his company for a time, by keeping the latter in my own possession till I got him regularly launched in the story, when, to quicken at once his recollection and his elocution, I treated him to an inspiring draught. When he had told his tale, he left me with many thanks for the refection; and I descending to his boat, entered it, and with the aid of a broken oar contrived to scull myself over to the island, the scene of the final fortunes of Connor O’Rourke and Norah M’Diarmod, the faithful-hearted but evil-fated pair who were in some sort perpetuated in its name. There, in sooth, within the crumbled walls, was the gravestone which covered the dust of him the brave and her the beautiful; and seating myself on the fragment of a sculptured capital, that showed how elaborately reared the ruined edifice had been, I bethought me how poorly man’s existence shows even beside the work of his own hands, and endeavoured for a time to make my thoughts run parallel with the history of this once-venerated but now forsaken, and, save by a few, forgotten structure; but finding myself fail in the attempt, settled my retrospect on that brief period wherein it was identified with the two departed lovers whose story I had just heard, and which, as I sat by their lowly sepulchre, I again repeated to myself.