Departure from Liverpool.—Travels Second-Class.—Arrival at Port Rush.—The Giant’s Causeway.—Lost and in Danger.—Dunluce Castle.—Effect upon the Travellers.—Condition of the Irish.—Arrival at Dumbarton.—Scaling the Castle Walls.—Walk to Loch Lomond.—Ascent of Ben Lomond.—Loch Katrine.—Visit to Stirling. Bayard and his companions, including the German student, with whom there had sprung up an intimate friendship, left Liverpool on the same day on which they arrived there, having found that they would reach Scotland via the Giant’s Causeway, as soon as they could by waiting for the more direct line. With an exercise of common-sense, such as characterizes too few Americans in this day of fashionable travel, they took passage second-class, finding themselves in no way the worse for the temporary inconvenience, while their fare was but one-sixth the amount of a first-class passage. It was not a comfortable night’s voyage on the way from Liverpool to Port Rush, in the north of Ireland, starting at ten o’clock in the evening, and arriving at eleven o’clock the next night. It may be that the cold and wet, the crowd of Irish passengers, the unvaried diet of bread and cheese, served the purpose of making the shores and bluffs more attractive,[51] as the mind naturally seeks and usually obtains some comfort and recreation in the most doleful surroundings. It is a glorious thing to look upon those basaltic hexagons of the Giant’s Causeway, under any circumstances. Those enormous natural columns, set side by side, so close as to make a floor along their tops, so strange, so unaccountably symmetrical, fill the soul with awe, and half persuade the least credulous beholder that there were giants in the days of yore, and that they really did build a thoroughfare of these huge prisms across to Scotland. Any traveller contemplates those matchless piles with surprise, and every sojourner is delighted beyond estimation by the contour and echoes of the vast caverns, into which the ocean rolls with such enchanting combinations of sound and motion. But to young men who had seen but little of the world and its natural wonders, and who had suffered a kind of martyrdom for the sake of visiting them, those resounding caverns, and those mighty ruins of gigantic natural temples, must have been inspiring beyond measure. Every traveller recalls with the most clear and grateful remembrance, the first landscapes of Europe, on which rest his ocean-weary eyes. To these young men the landscapes were about their only joy, and they appreciated them accordingly. Bayard seems to have been very enthusiastic. He scrutinized everything and questioned everybody. He let nothing pass him unnoticed, although in his books he left much unmentioned. He clambered into the[52] lofty recesses of the Causeway, and let himself down into the strange niches. He halloed in the caves for the thundering echoes; he drank three times at the magical Giant’s Well. He strayed from the highway that led from Port Rush to the Causeway, to look into the weird nooks which the sea has carved in the mutable shore. Dunluce Castle, with its broken walls and ghastly towers—home of proud Lord Antrim—and home as well of that family’s terrible banshee, was the first old ruin which Bayard visited. It stands on the verge of the cragged cliffs, with the sea beating about its base, and bellowing in the cavern under it. It is located near the highway which leads from Port Rush to the Causeway. Across the narrow footway, and into these ruins, Bayard rushed most eagerly. The same old man who now shows travellers the battlements, and tells to wondering hundreds the tales of tournament and banqueting-hall, was there then, and rehearsed the tale to him. The boy is gone. But the old man, whom Bayard mentions as an old man then, lives on in his dull routine, yet living less in a half century than Bayard lived in a single year.
All this was fresh and glorious to the youth, and gave him a very pleasant foretaste of the rich experiences in store for him. But, as if the fates conspired to chill his intellectual joys with physical discomforts, a rain came pouring upon them as they returned, the wind blew in fierce gusts, darkness, deep and black, settled upon the land; they lost their way, and floundered[53] about in muddy ravines, and barely escaped destruction as they trod the edges of the precipices above the wildest of seas. They became separated from each other, and the howling of winds and waves among the crags was so hideous that they could not for a long time hear each other’s call, and the worst of fears for each other were added to their own dismay. But they somehow blundered upon the path as it emerged from the wild rocks, and together walked the beach to their hotel, soaking and half frozen. But all those trying experiences fade when the skin is dry, and the sweet sleep of healthy youth comes with its comforting oblivion; only the gorgeous landscapes, and the romantic places, like the memories of boyhood, remain to shape the dreams.
Bayard was shocked by the miserable condition of the Irish peasantry, and his description of their huts, and their appearance, given in his letters, shows great sympathy for their distress, and great disgust at their degraded customs. On his way to Greenock from Port Rush, he fell in with a company of them, who chanced to take the same steamer, and he did not enjoy their drunken and beastly songs and riots. But on his trip from Greenock, up the Clyde to Dumbarton, he had more acceptable companionship, and in his book he refers, with a most touching simplicity, to the music of a strolling musician on board the boat, who played “Hail Columbia” and “Home, Sweet Home.”
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Old Scotland! Noble old hills! Charming lakes, and enchanting valleys! How like the awakened memories of loved faces, they come back to us when we hear the word “Dumbarton&rdquo............