squirrels barking love to each other in the high branches, and in that
moment the glamour that was upon me vanished in a twinkling.

"But I really did see the fairies!" I exclaimed triumphantly to Benella
the doubter, when I returned Carrig-a-fooka Inn, much too late for
luncheon.

"I want to know!" she exclaimed, in her New England vernacular. "I
guess by the looks o' your eyes they didn't turn out to be very lively
comp'ny!"

Part Fifth--Royal Meath.

Chapter XXVI. Ireland's gold.

'I sat upon the rustic seat--
The seat an aged bay-tree crowns--
And saw outspreading from our feet
The golden glory of the Downs.
The furze-crowned heights, the glorious glen,
The white-walled chapel glistening near,
The house of God, the homes of men,
The fragrant hay, the ripening ear.'
Denis Florence M'Carthy.

The Old Hall, Devorgilla,
Vale of the Boyne.

We have now lived in each of Ireland's four provinces, Leinster,
Munster, Ulster, and Connaught, but the confines of these provinces, and
their number, have changed several times since the beginning of history.
In A.D. 130 the Milesian monarchy was restored in the person of Tuathal
(Too'hal) the Legitimate. Over each of the Irish provinces was a ri or
king, and there was also over all Ireland an Ard-ri or supreme monarch
who lived at Tara up to the time of its abandonment in the sixth
century. Before Tuathal's day, the Ard-ri had for his land allowance
only a small tract around Tara, but Tuathal cut off a portion from each
of the four older provinces, at the Great Stone of Divisions in the
centre of Ireland, making the fifth province of Royal Meath, which
has since disappeared, but which was much larger than the present two
counties of Meath and Westmeath. In this once famous, and now most
lovely and fertile spot, with the good republican's love of royalty and
royal institutions, we have settled ourselves; in the midst of verdant
plains watered by the Boyne and the Blackwater, here rippling over
shallows, there meandering in slow deep reaches between reedy banks.

The Old Hall, from which I write, is somewhere in the vale of the Boyne,
somewhere near Yellow Steeple, not so far from Treadagh, only a few
miles from Ballybilly (I hope to be forgiven this irreverence to the
glorious memory of his Majesty, Wi