At Carrickfergus you are already well advanced on the prettiest road in all Ireland--that which skirts the northern shore of Belfast Lough, then, crossing the neck of Island Magee peninsula, carries you past Larne's inland water, and from Larne follows the cliffy shoreline up to where Fair Head marks the northern limit of Antrim's eastward-looking coast. Then, cutting in behind the Head, it emerges on the pleasant town of Ballycastle, sheltered in its bay, and so follows the coast again past the castles of Dunseverick and Dunluce, famous ruins, and past the Giant's Causeway, that still more famous piece of an older and more majestic architecture. Portrush ends your journey if you be a golfer; but dearer to me than the links at Portrush are the sandhills beyond Portstewart and the long strand at the entrance to Lough Foyle--ten miles of a stretch, but the Bann's outflow divides it. No other beach that I have known is rich in such a variety of shells; on no other sandhills do the little delicate sandflowers, ladies'-slipper, thyme, ladies'-bedstraw, and the rest, grow so charmingly. Now, in all that long coastline what to write about? First, perhaps, its geography. A line of high hills, or low mountains, runs north from Belfast, and beyond Larne they approach close to the sea. Westward of them is prosperous industrial country, draining into Lough Neagh or the Bann--a country of thriving towns, Ballymena and Ballymoney, with many factories. But east of this is the marginal land, running steeply down with short watercourses to the sea, and this is the country of the Glens of Antrim; lordship of the MacDonnells, who were also Lords of the Isles. The sea here--_Sruth na Maoile_, the Stream of the Moyle, is a link rather than a barrier; you could row across with no great danger in a skin-covered boat; and at this point the Gael of Alba and the Gael of Eire have been always one race. The Irish that I heard spoken by old men whom a Feis of the Glens had gathered together in Glen Ariff was few removes in sound and even in idiom from the Highland speech; and all tradition, whether Ossianic, in the stories of Finn and his companions, or that older cycle of the Red Branch, brings the Scotch islands and west coast into full touch with Irish legend. It was to the Isle of Skye that Cuchulain went for his training, to be taught by a woman warrior--whose name that island keeps as the Coolin Hills preserve his name; it was from the Scottish shore that Cuchulain's son by the daughter of this warrior-queen came over to contend with the Red Branch heroes, refusing his name in order--so the deserted witch designed it--that his father, the one man able to master him, might unknowingly slay his own son. I took down from the lips of an Ulster peasant, not able to read or write, and perhaps with ten generations behind him of folk who never used the pen, the carefully guarded text of a poem framed not later (from its