summer crowds of
wanderers sated with the business and the pleasures of great cities.
The beauties of that country are indeed too often hidden in the mist and
rain which the west wind brings up from a boundless ocean. But, on the
rare days when the sun shines out in all his glory, the landscape has
a freshness and a warmth of colouring seldom found in our latitude. The
myrtle loves the soil. The arbutus thrives better than even on the sunny
shore of Calabria, [123] The turf is of livelier hue than elsewhere:
the hills glow with a richer purple: the varnish of the holly and ivy
is more glossy; and berries of a brighter red peep through foliage of a
brighter green. But during the greater part of the seventeenth century,
this paradise was as little known to the civilised world as Spitzbergen
or Greenland. If ever it was mentioned, it was mentioned as a horrible
desert, a chaos of bogs, thickets, and precipices, where the she wolf
still littered, and where some half naked savages, who could not speak a
word of English, made themselves burrows in the mud, and lived on roots
and sour milk, [124]

At length, in the year 1670, the benevolent and enlightened Sir William
Petty determined to form an English settlement in this wild district.
He possessed a large domain there, which has descended to a posterity
worthy of such an ancestor. On the improvement of that domain he
expended, it was said, not less than ten thousand pounds. The little
town which he founded, named from the bay of Kenmare, stood at the head
of that bay, under a mountain ridge, on the summit of which travellers
now stop to gaze upon the loveliest of the three lakes of Killarney.
Scarcely any village, built by an enterprising band of New Englanders,
far from the dwellings of their countrymen, in the midst of the hunting
grounds of the Red Indians, was more completely out of the pale of
civilisation than Kenmare. Between Petty's settlement and the nearest
English habitation the journey by land was of two days through a wild
and dangerous country. Yet the place prospered. Forty-two houses were
erected. The population amounted to a hundred and eighty. The land round
the town was well cultivated. The cattle were numerous. Two small barks
were employed in fishing and trading along the coast. The supply of
herrings, pilchards, mackerel, and salmon was plentiful, and would have
been still more plentiful, had not the beach been, in the finest part
of the year, covered b