That valley is to my mind the most beautiful and the most typically beautiful thing in Leinster. For Leinster is the province of cultivated fertility; it is also the province of great and beautiful rivers. The Shannon, except from Killaloe and Limerick, is somewhat lacking in beauty; it has majesty, but not charm. In Leinster the rivers are more manageable in size--the Nore, the Barrow, the Boyne, the Liffey, and the Slaney. Each of them has its own character; and the lower tidal reaches of the Slaney, reed-fringed and swan-haunted, are not less lovely than the salmon pool in the upper waters near Carlow which Mr. Williams has drawn so lovingly. And those who imagine Ireland as a country of mere beggary might find something to learn as well as to see either amid the fertility of Meath or again in South Leinster, where a poorer soil has been tilled into high perfection. The valley of the Nore in particular is affluent in loveliness from its banks at Kilkenny, where Moore courted the pretty actress who made him the best of wives, down to the head of the tideway at Inistiogue, where under the shelter of Mr. Tighe's great woods you can stay at a neat little hotel in a charming village, and fish to heart's content in splendid pools and shallows, where trout and salmon are plenty, and if you cannot catch them, it must be either your fault or theirs. And if they are hard to capture--as I found them in weather which all but fishermen adored--that is just because it is a free water, because here as everywhere there is something of that easy live and let live spirit which endears Ireland to those that know her, and which everywhere makes the visitor welcome--perhaps with most natural kindliness in those parts which are least accustomed to look upon the stranger as a source of revenue. The most beautiful places in Leinster are far less known to Englishmen than the barren cliffs of Achill. Yet if you go to Inistiogue, or any similar place in Leinster, you will begin to realize why it is that in Leinster only of the provinces does the population increase in these days.
There, under the new conditions of tenure, the farmer begins to invest freely, his money and his labour, upon soil that can repay exertion, and under a climate that has none of Ulster's harshness. In Wexford, where most of the Irish tobacco was grown till the growing of it was prohibited by an amazing Act of Parliament some seventy years ago, the plant took so kindly to the soil that it perpetuated itself without cultivation: and when (after infinite solicitation and manoeuvring) leave was given us to revive this industry, the distinctive variety was recovered from these casual plants, and has been cultivated among other species in Colonel Edwards's farm at Navan. Now a soil and a climate in which tobacco will reproduce itself in the wild state is a rare combination so far north, and Wexford men are trying to utilize its advantages.