e in one place
upon a sawmill at work in the forest, and Mr. Kavanagh showed us with
pride the piles of excellent timber which he turns out here. But he took
a greater pride in a group, sacred from the axe, of really magnificent
Scotch firs, such as I had certainly not expected to find in Ireland.
Nearer the mansion are some remarkable Irish yews. The gardens are of
all sorts and very extensive, but we found the head-gardener bitterly
lamenting the destruction by a fire in one of the conservatories of more
than six thousand plants just prepared for setting out.

There are many curious old books and papers here, and a student of early
Irish history might find matter to keep him well employed for a long
time in this region. It was from this region and the race which ruled
it, of which race Mr. Kavanagh is the actual representative, that the
initiative came of the first Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Strongbow
made what, from the Anglo-Norman point of view, was a perfectly
legitimate bargain, with a dispossessed prince to help him to the
recovery of his rights on the understanding that these rights, when
recovered, should pass in succession to himself through the only
daughter of the prince, whom he proposed to marry. It does not appear
that Strongbow knew, or that Dermot MacMorrogh cared to tell him, how
utterly unlike the rights of an Anglo-Norman prince were those of the
elective life-tenant of an Irish principality. FitzStephen, the son by
her second marriage of Nesta, the Welsh royal mistress of Henry
Beauclerk, and his cousin, Maurice Fitzgerald, the leaders into Ireland
of the Geraldines, were no more clear in their minds about this than
Strongbow, and it is to the original muddle thus created that Professor
Richey doubtless rightly refers the worst and most troublesome
complications of the land question in Ireland. The distinction between
the King's lieges and the "mere Irish," for example, is unquestionably a
legal distinction, though it is continually and most mischievously used
as if it were a proof of the race-hatred borne by the Normans and Saxons
in Ireland from the first against the Celts. The O'Briens, the O'Neills,
the O'Mullaghlins, the O'Connors, and the M'Morroghs, "the five bloods,"
as they are called, were certainly Celts, but whether in virtue of their
being, or claiming to be, the royal races respectively of Minister, of
Ulster, of Meath, of Connaught, and of Leinster, or from whatever other
reas