[Illustration: CAVE HILL, BELFAST] Belfast--when you reach it--is not calculated to charm the eye. It has the features of any English manufacturing town so far as its buildings are concerned, and the finest structures it can show (without disparaging its handsome Town Hall) are the vast fabrics which rise in the dockyards, such ships as have never been built in the world before--marvels of symmetry and strength. To see them in the building up is to watch, perhaps, the most impressive exhibition of human skill and energy. Ireland, for all its defective development, can boast of heading the world in certain enterprises: Guinness's brewery, Harland and Wolff's engineering works, and Barbour's great net and rope factory at Lisburn are, each in its kind, the biggest and best in Europe, or out of it. Once you get down to the water in Belfast, beauty is abundant, and for my part I like best the view from the docks. But Mr. Williams has chosen a distant indication of the town under the bold headland, at whose foot it lies so well. This aspect of Cave Hill does not show its strange feature--the vast Napoleonic profile flung up against an eastern sky. Time was when Belfast must have been curiously divided about that portent; for in the Revolution period northern Ireland was fiercely republican. It was on Cave Hill that Wolfe Tone, most formidable of all Irish rebels, with a group of young Ulster democrats, founded the Society of United Irishmen. Belfast does not dwell much on these memories to-day, nor indeed on any memories; her interest is in the prosperous present, the growing future. And although it has its absurdities, notably in the claim to be more populous than Dublin (a result achieved by omitting Rathmines and Pembroke, townships separately governed, but as much part of Dublin as Kensington and Chelsea are of London), the strong pride of Belfast is amply justified. It is not its proximity to Scotch coalfields nor its moist climate (dear to spinners) which really makes its fortune, it is the hard-bitten, restless, courageous spirit of its people. Like Dublin, it has close access to places of great natural charm. Just beyond Cave Hill, on the north shore of the lough, is Carrickfergus Castle, whose grim strength Mr. Williams has excellently suggested. It was built within six years of the Norman invasion, by de Courcy, first grantee of Ulster; and here, as at Carlingford, the invaders managed to retain their grip. The Bruces wrested it, after a fierce siege, from de Lacy, who then held it, Robert Bruce aiding his brother; but on Edward Brace's defeat it fell back to the English. In the ultimate conquest of Ireland it marked a great moment, for here William of Orange landed, and pious care has recorded the flagstone on which he first set his foot.