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24
LEINSTER
III
Beauty of this kind stretches away from Dublin
north and west over the broad fertile plain of Fingal,
the territory of the "White Strangers", the fair-haired
Norsemen. You can find such beauty, with scenic
accessories, in the famous Phoenix Park — so called
by corruption of the Gaelic name given to a well
there, Fionn Uisge, the Bright Water. The wide
expanse of the park has lovely glades, deer-haunted
like the one which Mr. Williams has pictured; it
has backgrounds of mountain, the Dublin hills loom-
ing up to the south; it has foregrounds of cricket
matches, or, better still, of hurling. Hurley is the
most picturesque game I have ever seen played, ex-
cept polo; and polo, too, in the summer, you can
watch in the Phoenix at its very best, though the
splendid ground is less beautiful than it was before the
great " February storm " of 1903 swept down the long
line of elms which bordered it. Still, in "horseshow
week ", when the cup matches are on, all the world can
go and see, "free, gracious, and for nothing", one of
the finest spectacles that modern civilization can afford.
Skirting the park to the south, and trending west-
ward, is the valley of the Liffey, and no one looking
at the unsightly, sometimes unsavoury, stream which
divides Dublin would guess at the beautiful water which