in County Down, and by cutting two large lakes, now combined, in the grounds, thus providing much-needed employment for the labouring population of the neighbourhood at the time of the great famine, when general distress was almost as rife in the North as in the South of Ireland. One of these avenues terminates at Helen's Bay, a beautiful little spot well known to sailors on the north coast, in whose proximity a pretty little bathing village has come into existence. Another of the long green alleys leads to Helen's Tower, built by Lord Dufferin in his mother's honour, and which is furnished as a residence, each story consisting of one minute room and its own portion of the spiral staircase, and it rises to such a height that anyone taking up their station by the flag-staff on the platform at the top has a view of the distant shores of Cantyre, Wigtonshire, and of the Isle of Man.
Helen's tower, Clandeboye.
In a little work published for private circulation, one notices with interest that the lady to whom, in 1850, was assigned the task of christening this romantic tower, was Mrs. Rowan-Hamilton, of Killyleagh Castle, the wife of Lord Dufferin's nearest neighbour and closest friend, and whose daughter was, a dozen years later, to become the Countess of Dufferin.
Among our illustrations we give one of the monument which has been celebrated in the verse of some of the greatest writers of our day. A sonnet of Robert Browning's compares this "Love's rock-built tower" of the island in the north to that of the "Greek beauty of the Scæan Gate," while in the recent editions of Lord Tennyson's works are to be found other lines on it beginning—
"Helen's tower, here I stand—
Dominant o'er sea and land;
Son's love built me, and I hold
Mother's love engraved in gold."
Space must also be made for a short extract from the exquisite lines in which Lady Dufferin resigned her guardianship of her son, which are engraved on a marble slab fixed to the inner wall of the tower:—
"At a most solemn pause we stand,
From this day forth—for evermore,
The weak, but loving human hand,
Must cease to guide thee as of yore.
Then as thro' life thy footsteps stray,
And earthly beacons dimly shine,
'Let there be light' upon thy way,
And holier guidance far than mine;
Let there be light in thy clear soul,
When passion tempts or doubts assail;
When grief's dark tempests o'er thee roll,
Let there be light that shall not fail!
. . . And pray, that she whose hand doth trace
This heart warm prayer, when life is past,
May see and know thy blessed face
In God's own glorious light at last."
Lord Dufferin inherited a love of the sea from his father, a captain in Her Majesty's Navy, and a few years later he struck the keel of his yacht, the Foam, against the walls of the towers which guard the inviolate sanctuary of the Virgin of the Ice-realm. The title of that most attractive tale of the sea is "Letters from High Latitudes," and the writer, while steering his own vessel through the thick, black night of the North, and wielding with his own hand the iron bars which pushed off the ice-blocks threatening to engulf her, found time to record the legends he heard on the way. He covered a distance of six thousand miles before he returned home, came within six hundred and thirty miles of the North Pole, and re-discovered the island of Jan Mayen, which had so long been lost behind its opaque barrier of fog. Not the least interesting part of this fascinating book are the illustrations from the
