We left _Limerick_ for _Killarney_ by the mail train, at 11.30 a.m., entering the main line of the _Great Southern and Western Railway_ after an hour's travelling, progressing thereon as far as _Mallow_ (the town upon the banks of _the Blackwater_, with its church, and trees, and picturesque bridge, is a sweet little “study,” and looked as though the sun shone there always); and thence by a branch line to _Killarney_, which we reached at 4 p.m. We passed through a country (including part of _the Golden Vale of Limerick_ 1) varied, fertile, and well-cultivated, although two young officers (who looked at us, when we entered their carriage at Mallow, as though I were at the crisis of small-pox, and my friend a ticket-of-leave man) declared, as they woke up just opposite an embankment, that the scenery was “beastly plain.”
1 “It extends from Charleville to Tipperary by Kilfinnan nearly thirty miles, and again across from Ardpatrick to within a short distance of Limerick city, sixteen miles.”-- _Saxon in Ireland_, p. 101.
There are words which, although unnoticed in the delightful treatises of the Dean of Westminster 1 (may his fame increase!) have a strange power upon the heart,--words which can ring for us, listening by the brookside, and in arbours and meadow-haunts once more, the joy-bells of a former mirth, or toll above past sorrows and buried hopes their muffled and mournful peal. Breathes there, for instance, a man with soul so dead, who can hear of a _primrose bank, or a cowslip-ball, or a roly-poly pudding, or a sillabub, or a soap bubble, or a pantomime, or of Robinson Crusoe_, and not feel himself, though it be but for a moment, a happy child again? And do we not realise, on the other hand, in all their brief intensity, our earliest sorrows, when memory suggests to us those solemn sounds of woe, _measles, big-brother, ghosts, dentists, castor-oil?_
1 Dr. Trench, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin.
And who (to pass on to boyhood) can ever hear of _foot-ball_, especially if Tom Brown speak, without longing for a kick to goal? Who can be reminded of _the river_, and not remember those summer days, when, nude and jubilant, we took first a preliminary canter among the haycocks, and then “a header” into the deep, cold stream? or, again, those merry days of winter, when, from our slippery skates we took--well, anything but “a _header_” upon its glibly frozen surface? On the other hand, who does not felicitate himself that he has arrived at man's estate, when he recalls those awful _impositions_ which he still believes have softened his brain, or when his memory (not to particularise) is tingling at the idea of _birch_, and contemplating a “_Visitation of Arms and Seats_” long anterior to Mr. Bernard Burke's?