little bays the wild influence that prevails without, and see their
quiet waters ruffled and wave-tossed, so, too, prosperity follows the
same law, and spreads its genial sunshine in a wide circle around
the spot it brightens. For miles and miles along the shore the grand
Glengariff scheme diffused the golden glory of its success. Little
fishing-villages, solitary cottages in sequestered glens, lonely creeks,
whose yellow strands had seldom seen a foot-track,--all felt it. The
patient habits of humble industry seemed contemptible to those who
came back to their quiet homesteads after seeing the wondrous doings
at Glengariff; and marvellous, indeed, were the narratives of sudden
fortunes. One had sold his little "shebeen" for more gold than he knew
how to count; another had become rich by the price of the garden before
his door; the shingly beach seemed paved with precious stones, the rocks
appeared to have grown into bullion. How mean and despicable seemed
daily toil; the weary labor of the field, the precarious life of the
fisherman, in presence of such easy prosperity, were ignoble drudgery.
It savored of superior intelligence to exchange the toil of the hands
for the exercise of speculative talents, and each began to compute what
some affluent purchaser might not pay for this barren plot, what that
bleak promontory might not bring in this market of fanciful bidders.

Let us note the fact that the peasant was not a little amused by the
absurd value which the rich man attached to objects long familiar and
unprized by himself. The picturesque and the beautiful were elements so
totally removed from all his estimate of worth, that he readily ascribed
to something very like insanity the great man's fondness for them. That
a group of stone pines on a jutting cliff, a lone and rocky island, a
ruined wall, an ancient well canopied by a bower of honeysuckle, should
be deemed objects of price, appeared to be the most capricious of all
tastes; and, in his ignorance as to what imparted this value, he glutted
the market with everything that occurred to him. Spots of ground the
least attractive, tenements occupying the most ill-chosen sites, ugly
and misshapen remains of cottages long deserted, were all vaunted as
fully as good or better than their neighbors had sold for thousands.
It must be owned, the market price of any article seemed the veriest
lottery imaginable. One man could actually find no purchaser for four
acres of the