YOU may well believe that, with such variegated loveliness all about us, we did not linger in the hotel a moment longer than was necessary, but made a hasty tea and sallied forth to explore the neighbourhood. First of all, Betty must pick some fuchsias, so we went back to the road, and climbed over a wall into a field surrounded by high hedges of the gorgeous flower. It was a new experience for Betty to reach up overhead and break off great branches which were simply masses of scarlet bells, until she had her arms full, and I suspect she went a little wobbly over it; but she was to have the same experience many times thereafter, for the fuchsia grows in great profusion throughout southern and western Ireland.
I saw but one variety, however, the flower of which has a dark blue trumpet and scarlet bell, but this is perhaps the most showy of all, and nothing could be more gorgeous than a hedge in full bloom. In the woods, or in gardens where they are left untrimmed, the bushes will grow into veritable trees, twenty-five or thirty feet high.
We went back to the hotel, when Betty had gathered all she could carry, and she sent the flowers up to our room by a maid who laughed sympathetically--I fancy she had seen such attacks of madness more than once before--and then we started along a winding path which led through the woods down to the shore of the bay. And we soon found that fuchsias were not the only things which grow to giant proportions here, for the path was hedged with ferns four or five feet high--great, lordly fellows, standing stiffly upright as though on parade. Ferns were everywhere, even on the trees overhead, for the trees are padded with moss, and in this the ferns have found a foothold. And there were holly trees still scarlet with last year's berries, and hawthorn fragrant with bloom; and over everything the English ivy ran riot--rather in the same fashion, I thought as I looked at it, in which England herself has run riot over Ireland.
We got down to the shore of the bay, at last, and I quite agree with Thackeray that it is a world's wonder, with its rock-strewn shore and emerald islands and pellucid water, framed in, all about, by rugged mountains. We wandered along its edge, gay with sea-pinks, for an hour or more, and then spent another hour loitering in the woods, and finally walked on, between the flaming hedges and fern-draped trees, to the little village, which we could smell, long before we came to it, by the tang of peat-smoke in the air. It is a mere huddle of low, thatched houses, and I judge that, even amid these gorgeous surroundings, life can be as hard and sordid as anywhere in Ireland.