In the afternoon we took a delightful walk to Killone Abbey, a pile of monastic ruins on a lovely site near a very picturesque lake.  The ruins have been used as a quarry by all the country, and are now by no means extensive.  But the precincts are used as a graveyard, not only by the people of Ennis, but by the farmers and villagers for many miles around.  Nothing can be imagined more painful than the appearance of these precincts.  The graves are, for the most part, shallow, and closely huddled together.  The cemetery, in truth, is a ghastly slum, a “tenement-house” of the dead.  The dead of to-day literally elbow the dead of yesterday out of their resting-places, to be in their turn displaced by the dead of to-morrow.  Instead of the crosses and the fresh garlands, and the inscriptions full of loving thoughtfulness, which lend a pathetic charm to the German “courts of peace”—­instead of the carefully tended hillocks and flower-studded turf which make the churchyard of a typical old English village beautiful,—­all here is confusion, squalor, and neglect.  Fragments of coffins and bones lie scattered among the sunken and shattered stones.  We picked up a skull lying quite apart in a corner of the enclosure.  A clean round bullet hole in the very centre of the frontal bone was dumbly and grimly eloquent.  Was it the skull of a patriot or of a policeman? of a “White-boy” or of a “landlord”?

One thing only was apparent from the conformation of the grisly relic.  It was the skull of a Celt.  Probably, therefore, not of a land agent, shot to repress his fiduciary zeal, but perhaps of some peasant selfishly and recklessly bent on paying his rent.

While we wandered amid the ruins we came suddenly upon a woman wearing a long Irish cloak, and accompanied by two well-dressed men.  One of the men started upon catching sight of Colonel Turner, who was of our party, grew quite red for a moment, and then very civilly exchanged salutations with him.  The party walked quietly away on a lower road leading to Ennis.  When they had gone Colonel Turner told us that the man who had spoken to him was a local Nationalist of repute and influence in Ennis.  “He would never have ventured to be civil to me in the town,” he said.  A discussion arose as to the probable object of the party in visiting these ruins.  A gentleman who was with us half-laughingly suggested that they might have been putting away dynamite bombs for an attack on Edenvale.  Colonel Turner’s more practical and probable theory was that they were looking about for a site for the grave of the Fenian veteran, Stephen J. Meany, who died in America not long ago.  He was a native, I believe, of Ennis, and his remains are now on their way across the Atlantic for interment in his birth-place.  “Would a processional funeral be allowed for him?” I asked.  Colonel Turner could see no reason why it should not be.