leaving the stones once more open to the light, standing, as they always
stood, on the surface of the clay.

Here again we get the same measurement. At eight hundred annual layers
to the foot, and with twelve feet of peat, we have nine thousand six
hundred years,--not for the age of the stone circles, but for that part
of their age which we are able to measure. For we know not how long they
were there before the peat began to grow. It may have been a few years;
it may have been a period as great or even greater than the ten thousand
years we are able to measure.

The peat gradually displaced an early forest of giant oaks. Their stems
are still there, standing rooted in the older clay. Where they once
stood no trees now grow. The whole face of the land has changed. Some
great change of climate must lie behind this vanishing of vast forests,
this gradual growth of peat-covered moors. A dry climate must have
changed to one much damper; heat must have changed to cold, warm winds
to chilly storms. In the southern promontories, among red sandstone
hills, still linger survivors of that more genial clime--groves of
arbutus that speak of Greece or Sicily; ferns, as at Killarney, found
elsewhere only in the south, in Portugal, or the Canary Islands.

[Illustration: Muckross Abbey, Killarney.]

On the southwestern horizon from Toppid Mountain, when the sky is clear
after rain, you can trace the outline of the Curlew hills, our
southern limit of view from Knocknarea. Up to the foot of the hills
spreads a level country of pastures dappled with lakes, broken into a
thousand fantastic inlets by the wasting of the limestone rock. The
daisies are the stars in that green sky. Just beyond the young stream of