llustration of a stone drinking-cup, which is
considered a very beautiful specimen of its kind. This great rarity was
found in the Shannon excavations. We give a specimen below of a celt,
and on page 246 of a celt mould, for which we have also to acknowledge
our grateful obligations to the Council of the Royal Irish Academy.

[Illustration: STONE DRINKING-CUP.]

Drink was usually served to the guests after meals. Among the seven
prerogatives for the King of Teamhair (Tara) we find:

"The fruits of Manann, a fine present;
And the heath fruit of Brigh Leithe;
The venison of Nas; the fish of the Boinn;
The cresses of the kindly Brosnach."

[Illustration: PALSTAVE CELT.]

Dr. O'Donovan suggests that the "heath fruit" may have been bilberries
or whortleberries, and adds that some of the old Irish suppose that
this, and not the heath, was the shrub from which the Danes brewed their
beer.[259] It would appear that the Celts were not in the habit of
excessive drinking until a comparatively recent period. In the year 1405
we read of the death of a chieftain who died of "a surfeit in drinking;"
but previous to this entry we may safely assert that the Irish were
comparatively a sober race. The origin of the drink called whisky in
modern parlance, is involved in considerable obscurity. Some authorities
consider that the word is derived from the first part of the term
usquebaugh; others suppose it to be derived from the name of a place,
the Basque provinces, where some such compound was concocted in the
fourteenth century. In Morewood's _History of Inebriating Liquors_, he
gives a list of the ingredients used in the composition of usquebaugh,
and none of these are Irish productions.

There is a nice distinction between aqua vitae and aqua vini in the Red
Book of Ossory, which was rescued by Dr. Graves from a heap of rubbish,
the result of a fire in Kilkenny Castle in 1839. MacGeoghegan, in his
annotations on the death of the chieftain above-mentioned, observes that
the drink was not _aqua vitae_ to him, but rather _aqua mortis_; and he
further remarks, that this is the first notice of the use of _aqua
vitae_, usquebaugh, or whisky, in the Irish annals. Mead was made from
honey, and beer from malt; and these were, probably, the principal
liquors at the early period[260] of which we are now writing. As to the
heath beer of Scandinavian fame, it is probable that the heather was
merely used as a tonic or aromatic