t the deep crimson of the evening sky, was nearly upon a level
with the house, and completely so with the beeches that surrounded it.
Brightly did the sinking sun fall upon their tops, whilst the neat white
house below, in their quiet shadow, sent up its wreath of smoke
among their branches, itself an emblem of contentment, industry, and
innocence. It was, in fact, a lovely situation; perhaps the brighter
to me, that its remembrance is associated with days of happiness and
freedom from the cares of a world, which, like a distant mountain,
darkens as we approach it, and only exhausts us in struggling to climb
its rugged and barren paths.

There was to the south-west of this house another little hazel glen,
that ended in a precipice formed, by a single rock some thirty feet,
high, over which tumbled a crystal cascade into a basin worn in its
hard bed below. From this basin the stream murmured away through the
copse-wood, until it joined a larger rivulet that passed, with many a
winding, through a fine extent of meadows adjoining it. Across the foot
of this glen, and past the door of the house we have described, ran a
bridle road, from time immemorial; on which, as the traveller ascended
it towards the house, he appeared to track his way in blood, for a
chalybeate spa arose at its head, oozing out of the earth, and spread
itself in a crimson stream over the path in every spot whereon a
foot-mark could be made. From this circumstance it was called Tubber
Derg, or the Red Well. In the meadow where the glen terminated, was
another spring of delicious crystal; and clearly do I remember the
ever-beaten pathway that led to it through the grass, and up the green
field which rose in a gentle slope to the happy-looking house of Owen
M'Carthy, for so was the man called who resided under its peaceful roof.

I will not crave your pardon, gentle reader, for dwelling at such length
upon a scene so clear to my heart as this, because I write not now so
much for your gratification as my own. Many an eve of gentle May have
I pulled the Maygowans which grew about that well, and over that smooth
meadow.

Often have I raised my voice to its shrillest pitch, that I might hear
its echoes rebounding in the bottom of the green and still glen, where
silence, so to speak, was deepened by the continuous murmur of the
cascade above; and when the cuckoo uttered her first note from among the
hawthorns on its side, with what trembling anxiety did I, an