If you want to fall head over ears in love chanel bags with Ireland at the very first sight of her charms, take, as we did, the steamer from Cappoquin to Youghal, and float down the vale of the Blackwater--
     'Swift Awniduff, which of the Englishman
     Is cal' de Blackwater.'
     The shores of this Irish Rhine are so lovely that the sail on a sunny day is one of unequalled charm. Behind us the mountains ranged themselves in a mysterious melancholy background; ahead the river wended its way southward in and out, in and out, through rocky cliffs and well-wooded chanel handbags shores.
     The first tributary stream that we met was the little Finisk, on the higher banks of which is Affane House. The lands of Affane are said to have been given by one of the FitzGeralds to Sir Walter Raleigh for a breakfast, a very high price to pay for bacon and eggs, and it was here that he planted the first cherry-tree in Ireland, bringing it from the Canary Islands to the Isle of Weeping.
     Looking back just below here, we saw the tower and cloisters chanel bags of Mount Melleray, the Trappist monastery. Very beautiful and very lonely looked 'the little town of God,' in the shadows of the gloomy hills. We wished we had known the day before how near we were to it, for we could have claimed a night's lodging at the ladies' guest-house, where all creeds, classes, and nationalities are received with a cead-mile-failte, [*] and where any offering for food or shelter is given only at the visitors pleasure. The Celtic proverb, 'Melodious is the closed mouth,' ugg boots clearance might be written over the cloisters; for it is a village of silence, and only the monks who teach in the schools or who attend visitors are absolved from the vow.
     *A hundred thousand welcomes.
     Next came Dromana Castle, where the extraordinary old Countess of Desmond was born,--the wonderful old lady whose supposed one hundred and forty years so astonished posterity. She must have married Thomas, twelfth Earl of Desmond, after 1505, as his first wife is known to have been alive in that year. Raleigh saw ugg boots clearance her in 1589, and she died in 1604: so it would seem that she must have been at least one hundred and ten or one hundred and twelve when she met her untimely death,--a death brought about entirely by her own youthful impetuosity and her fondness for athletic sports. Robert Sydney, second Earl of Leicester, makes the following reference to her in his Table-Book, written when he was ambassador at Paris, about 1640:--