1 Ulysses
the matter of a couple of paltry pounds was debarred from
seeing more of the world they lived in instead of being al-
ways and ever cooped up since my old stick-in-the-mud
took me for a wife. After all, hang it, they had their elev-
en and more humdrum months of it and merited a radical
change of venue after the grind of city life in the summer-
time for choice when dame Nature is at her spectacular best
constituting nothing short of a new lease of life. There were
equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home
island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering
a plethora of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the
system in and around Dublin and its picturesque environs
even, Poulaphouca to which there was a steamtram, but also
farther away from the madding crowd in Wicklow, rightly
termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for
elderly wheelmen so long as it didn’t come down, and in the
wilds of Donegal where if report spoke true the coup d’oeil
was exceedingly grand though the lastnamed locality was
not easily getatable so that the influx of visitors was not as
yet all that it might be considering the signal benefits to be
derived from it while Howth with its historic associations
and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O’Malley, George IV,
rhododendrons several hundred feet above sealevel was a
favourite haunt with all sorts and conditions of men espe-
cially in the spring when young men’s fancy, though it had
its own toll of deaths by falling off the cliffs by design or ac-
cidentally, usually, by the way, on their left leg, it being only
about three quarters of an hour’s run from the pillar. Be-
cause of course uptodate tourist travelling was as yet merely