CHAPTER II.
A SAILOR ON SHORE.
It is a far easier thing to get into a house in Ireland than to get out of it again; for there is an attractive and retentive witchery about the hospitality of the natives of that country, which has no match, as far as I have seen, in the wide world.

In other places the people are hospitable or kind to a stranger; but in Ireland the affair is reduced to a sort of science, and a web of attentions is flung round the visitor before he well knows where he is: so that if he be not a very cold-blooded or a very temperate man, it will cost him sundry headaches--and mayhap some touches of the heartache--before he wins his way back again to his wonted tranquillity.
I had not a single acquaintance in Ireland when first I visited that most interesting of countries: before leaving it, however, after about a year and a-half's cruising off and on their coasts, I was on pretty intimate terms with one family at least for every dozen miles, from Downpatrick on the east, to the Bloody Foreland on the west, a range of more than a hundred and twenty miles.
The way in which this was brought about is sufficiently characteristic of the country.

I had inherited a taste for geology; and as the north of Ireland affords a fine field for the exercise of the hammer, I soon made myself acquainted with the Giant's Causeway, and the other wonders of that singular district.

While engaged in these pursuits, I fell in with an eminent medical practitioner resident in that part of the country, a gentleman well known to the scientific world: he was still better known on the spot as the most benevolent and kindest of men.

In no part of the globe have I made a more agreeable or useful acquaintance.