Our wood spurge is poisonous enough, but this is worse still; if you get a drop of its milk on your lip or eye, you will be in agonies for half a day.

That is the evil plant with which the poachers kill the salmon.
How do they do that?
When the salmon are spawning up in the little brooks, and the water is low, they take that spurge, and grind it between two stones under water, and let the milk run down into the pool; and at that all the poor salmon turn up dead.

Then comes the water-bailiff, and catches the poachers.
Then comes the policeman, with his sword at his side and his truncheon under his arm: and then comes a "cheap journey" to Tralee Gaol, in which those foolish poachers sit and reconsider themselves, and determine not to break the salmon laws--at least till next time.
But why is it that this spurge, and St.Patrick's cabbage, grow only here in the west?
If they got here of themselves, where did they come from?
All outside there is sea; and they could not float over that.
Come, I say, and sit down on this bench, and I will tell you a tale,--the story of the Old Atlantis, the sunken land in the far West.

Old Plato, the Greek, told legends of it, which you will read some day; and now it seems as if those old legends had some truth in them, after all.

We are standing now on one of the last remaining scraps of the old Atlantic land.