One exception I noted to the general slovenliness of the graves.  A new and handsome monument had just been set up by a man of Ennis, living in Australia, to the memory of his father and mother, buried here twenty years ago.  But this touching symbol of a heart untravelled, fondly turning to its home, had been so placed, either by accident or by design, as to block the entrance way to the vault of a family living, or rather owning property, in this neighbourhood.  Until within a year or two past this family had occupied a very handsome mansion in a park adjoining the park of Edenvale.  But the heir, worn out with local hostilities, and reduced in fortune by the pressure of the times and of the League, has now thrown up the sponge.  His ancestral acres have been turned over for cultivation to Mr. Stacpoole.  His house, a large fine building, apparently of the time of James II., containing, I am told, some good pictures and old furniture, is shut up, as are the model stables, ample enough for a great stud; and so another centre of local industry and activity is made sterile.

Near the ruins of Killone is a curious ancient shrine of St. John, beside a spring known as the Holy Well.  All about the rude little altar in the open air simple votive offerings were displayed, and Mrs. Stacpoole tells me pilgrims come here from Galway and Connemara to climb the hill upon their knees, and drink of the water.  Last year for the first time within the memory of man the well went dry.  Such was the distress caused in Ennis by this news, that on the eve of St. John certain pious persons came out from the town, drew water from the lake, and poured it into the well!

As we walked away one of the party pointed to a rabbit fleeing swiftly into a hole in one of the graves.  “I was on this hill,” he said, “one day not very long ago when a funeral train came out from Ennis.  As it entered the precincts a rabbit ran rapidly across the grounds.  Instantly the procession broke up; the coffin was literally dropped to the ground, and the bearers, the mourners, and the whole company united in a hot and general chase of bunny.  Of course, I need not say,” he added, “that there was no priest with them.  The fixed charge of the priest for a burial is twenty shillings, but there is usually no service at the grave whatever.”

This may possibly be a trace of the practices which grew up under the Penal Laws against Catholics.  When Rinuccini came to Ireland in the time of the Civil War, he found the observances of the Church all fallen into degradation through these laws.  The Holy Sacrifice was celebrated in the cabins, and not unfrequently on tables which had been covered half-an-hour before with the remains of the last night’s supper, and would be cleared half-an-hour afterwards for the midday meal, and perhaps for a game of cards.

Several guests joined us at dinner.  One gentleman, a magistrate familiar with Gweedore, told me he believed the statements of Sergeant Mahony as to the income of Father M’Fadden to fall within the truth.  While he believes that many people in that region live, as he put it, “constantly within a hair’s-breadth of famine,” he thinks that the great body of the peasants there are in a position, “with industry and thrift, not only to make both ends meet, but to make them overlap.”