Bayard and his companions, including the German student, with whom there had sprung up an intimate friendship, left Liverpool on the same day on which they arrived there, having found that they would reach Scotland via the Giant’s Causeway, as soon as they could by waiting for the more direct line. With an exercise of common-sense, such as characterizes too few Americans in this day of fashionable travel, they took passage second-class, finding themselves in no way the worse for the temporary inconvenience, while their fare was but one-sixth the amount of a first-class passage. It was not a comfortable night’s voyage on the way from Liverpool to Port Rush, in the north of Ireland, starting at ten o’clock in the evening, and arriving at eleven o’clock the next night. It may be that the cold and wet, the crowd of Irish passengers, the unvaried diet of bread and cheese, served the purpose of making the shores and bluffs¹ more attractive,[51] as the mind naturally seeks and usually obtains some comfort and recreation in the most doleful surroundings. It is a glorious thing to look upon those basaltic hexagons of the Giant’s Causeway, under any circumstances. Those enormous natural columns, set side by side, so close as to make a floor along their tops, so strange, so unaccountably symmetrical, fill the soul with awe³, and half persuade the least credulous⁴ beholder⁵ that there were giants in the days of yore, and that they really did build a thoroughfare of these huge prisms across to Scotland. Any traveller contemplates⁶ those matchless piles with surprise, and every sojourner⁷ is delighted beyond estimation by the contour and echoes of the vast

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