Western Railway terminus, or by Passage from the Albert Station, and
then by steamer to Queenstown. Taking the direct line the train runs
almost parallel with the promenade called the Marina, which separates
from the river side the broad pasture known as Cork Park, which is the
local race course. A race meeting at Cork is well worth witnessing. The
gay young bucks, described long ago by Arthur Young, still are with us,
and they and their lady friends make a fine flutter during race week.

[Illustration: _Photo, Lawrence, Dublin._ Queenstown Harbour.]

~Passage~ (~West~) was once the busy site of ship-building and
dock-yards, but the industry is no longer of anything like its original
proportions. The town is an old-fashioned place, and has not escaped the
pen of Father Prout, who, in what he calls "manifestly an imitation of
that unrivalled dithyramb," The Groves of Blarney--with little of its
humours and all its absurdity--signs the attractions of what he styles a
fashionable Irish watering-place:--

"The town of Passage
Is both large and spacious,
And situate
Upon the say;
'Tis nate and dacent,
And quite adjacent
To come from Cork
On a summer's day."

Steamers ply between the railway station at Passage and the many little
towns around the port. ~Glenbrook~ and ~Monkstown~ are particularly
picturesque. Above the latter, nestling in the trees, may be seen
Monkstown Castle, the legend attached to which says it was built for one
groat. The owner of the site, one of the Archdeckens, an Anglo-Irish
family, having gone away to the wars in the Lowlands, his better-half
promised him a pleasant surprise on his return. She employed a number of
workmen to build the castle, a condition of the contract being that they
should buy their food from her while so engaged. Truly, she was a shrewd
woman. Her profits were such, that she had enough to pay the entire cost
of the work, less one solitary groat.

~Spike Island~ is mentioned in Church History as a present given by a
Munster King to St. Cartach, of Lismore. In modern times it was used as
a convict prison, the convicts' labour being employed in the
construction of the fortifications around the harbour.

~Queenstown~, or, to give it its old Irish name, Cove, is built upon an
island. It is the paradise of naval pensioners, and the home of all
nationalities, yet Irish is still a spoken tongue not a mile away,
behind "Spy Hill." The magnificent Cathedral