A PILGRIMAGE

DEAR MR. POPLAR,-Having in a former number of your MAGAZINE given you a sketch of Quilca, and of some great and gentle names connected, as well with that locality, as with the Irish literature of the past century, I thought it probable that you and your readers, who doubtless are part of your integral self, might "lend a pliant ear" to the pencillings by the way of a little tour, made many years ago, into the heart of the Highlands of North Donegal.

This country, rich in striking and magnificent scenery, and producing a peasantry of peculiar and primitive character, has not been altogether unnoticed by your comprehensive periodical, as an able, instructive, and highly perspicacious article on "Gweedore," which appeared in the January number, can testify. Over that district, so well described, I will not venture to let my pen travel; nor will I trench upon the peculiar region of wild and wonderful scenery, already sketched by one who has now entered into his rest-one who united rare delineatory powers with thorough perception of character; a writer most attractive and sparkling, yet tempering all he wrote with the hue and the health of genuine piety-I mean the late Rev. Cæsar Otway. I am not attempting now to follow where he led; but, as a gleaner in a large highland field, I will only essay to do what he may have left undone "Impar congressus Achilli." And since I have gone so far out of my way as to bring Horace to illustrate a question about Donegal, I may as well make a further use of the Roman's wit and wisdom to introduce my subject, and start me upon my tour.

I need not quote his Latin, for every body knows where he says that many brave men were before Agamemnon and the wars of Troy, who lived and died unknown, because they had no one to sing their deeds or write their history. And as with mortals, so with

places. Many a majestic scene-soft, savage, or sublime-though named in the "Folio Family Atlas," or mathematically mensurated, and duly dotted down in the geography of the Ordnance survey, yet from not having been trodden by the traveller, or sung by the bard, or sketched by the painter, seems fated to waste its sweetness on the desert air of neglect, and be all but altogether forgotten. How has Moore immortalised the sister vales of Cachmere and Ovoca, in his Oriental and Hibernian verses; but, though all unsung, there are few more sweet, lovely valleys "in this wide world" than Glen Swilly in North Donegal, when seen at

right time and season-which is on a soft autumnal afternoon, when the sun is bright, and the corn is being cut along the holmes, and the swift Swilly runs clear as a diamond between its green banks, and the clustering rowan berries are blushing scarlet among the leaves of the mountain ash, and the poplars are trembling by the river, and the holly is glistening amidst the rocks, and the golden sallows are listening to the ripple of the water, and the song is sweet, and the whistle is shrill, and the laughter rings clear, and the voices are merry, as they come up together through the mellow air from those knots of harvesters who are binding the yellow stooks amidst the golden stubble; and the blue smoke curls up and over the wild wood on the hill, disclosing where many a tiny farmhouse lies, like a bird in its nest, ensconced amidst its leaves, and girt in by rocks and rills in its mountain solitude.

This lovely valley stands based upon the large land-locked sea lake which bears its name, and runs up, past the little thriving town of Letterkenny, for about six miles, between swelling hills, backed by darker and sterner mountains, the haunt of the eagle and hill fox. These eminences appear at one time to have been covered with wood, but now cleared-here for tillage, or there for pasture; while in other places

the primitive trees having been cut down, and the roots left in the ground, a second growth of timber has sprung up, consisting of dwarfed oak and ash, mingled with natural wood, such as birch, holly, mountain ash, and hazel, growing thickly amidst the clusters of whinstone rocks, or in the hollows and shelvings of the hills.

Through the glen, winding and twisting like a glittering serpent, runs the Swilly pronounced, with Ionian softness, Suillie. Its sound and sigui fication are alike poetical, the word meaning "eyes," which is expressive of its nature, inasmuch as its currents dimple all over with bright eyes in their course to the sea.

It rises somewhat to the right of the glen head, near a wild place called Tully honer, where the road comes to a stop in a gradual way, and the grass and moorland begin. Here is a lone farm-house; a dashing waterfall which hurries across the road, after descending from its height, and through whose stream you ride up to your horse's knees; and a grand and romantic echo from a high, grassy gorge of the mountain, which I recollect we named "The Glen of the Shouting Giant," from the loudness and vigour of its reverberations.

As the river sparkles and twines along through the valley, it is fed by numberless tributaries from the hillsin summer "tinkling runnels," in winter xupagga, or sounding torrents which rush from the mountains, generally down some rocky, precipitous ravine; and thus, after a morning's heavy rain, when the sun comes out, if you were to ride up the glen, you

would hear such a music of waterfalls as perhaps had never before greeted your ear, and you would see the snowy foam on the surface of the tumbling mass, appearing and disappearing among the bushes and foliage which generally are found growing along these rude and thundering water

courses.

Under the leadership of a kind friend who came in to meet us, we started, after breakfast, from the townlet of Letterkenny-a kind of frontier garrison to the glen, only it contains nothing in the warlike way, save the wrangle at petty sessions for the people love going to law-or the disputation of polemics the oft-recurring "duel, in the form of a debate," chin to chin-a

very innocent species of warfare, commencing in noise, and generally going out in smoke; for this village is a very litigious locality, and likewise a decidedly self-opinionated and pragmatical little spot agreeing to differ on all matters of ecclesiastical import, and possessing not less than seven houses of worship within its tiny circumference viz., a Church, Meetinghouse, Methodist Chapel, Secession ditto, Covenanting ditto, Baptist ditto, and a large Roman Catholic Chapel. It is likewise, beyond question, an industrious and meritoriously ambitious little metropolis, where there is much hardheaded honesty, and where good fortunes have been realised by trade.

It was market-day, as we rode down the "long unlovely street," as Tenison calls some fashionable highway in London; and the peasantry were thronging in from the country; and the shops and stalls swarmed like beehives with buyers and sellers. Here were sturdy Presbyterian farmers, bluecoated and well-fed; many of them riding their own nags, or driving their jaunting-cars, and giving every evidence that they were well to do in the world. And here were wild Irish kerne, from the hills beyond Glen Swilly, with frieze great coats, and worsted hose ungartered, and corduroy smalls unbuttoned, and disreputable-looking rakish caubeens cocked on the side of their heads, and large sticks in their hands-ready, like Louis Napoleon, for a rumpus. And here

were groups of the "merchants" of the town, called so, par excellence, inasmuch as the place has a port, of Lilliputian dimensions however, and bearing about the same proportion to a real mercantile town as the troops of the republic of Lucca did to the armaments of Europe, in the days of Oliver Goldsmith, consisting, as I think they did, of "seventy-five soldiers, a commander-in-chief, and two drummers of great experience!" And here were the neat and modest forms of many of the farmers' daughters, who had come to sell a few hackles of the flax which they themselves had manufactured, or to buy a shawl or gown-and, like most of our Irish peasantry, they love the bright colours. Dispensing with the burden of a bonnet, many of these northern lasses braid their hair over their brow, in the manner of our fair little Queen, which is all their head.