In the churchyard is a hillock, bare of grass, about a tomb.  There lies buried, according to tradition, a public functionary who attested a statement by exclaiming, “If I speak falsely, may grass never grow on my grave.”  One of his descendants is doubtless now an M.P.  Mr. Cameron had kindly written from Cork to the officer in charge of the constabulary here asking him to get me a good car for Lismore.  So Father Keller very kindly walked with me through the town to the “Devonshire Arms,” a very neat and considerable hotel, in quest of him.  On the way he pointed out to me what remains of a house which is supposed to have served as the headquarters of Cromwell while he was here, and a small chapel also in which the Protector worshipped after his sort.  Off the main street is a lane called Windmill Lane, where probably stood the windmill from which in 1580 a Franciscan friar, Father David O’Neilan, was hung by the feet and shot to death by the soldiers of Elizabeth because he refused to acknowledge the spiritual supremacy of the Queen.  He had been dragged through the main street at the tail of a horse to the place of execution.  His name is one of many names of confessors of that time about to be submitted at Rome for canonisation.  We could not find the officer I sought at the hotel, but Father Keller took me to a livery-man in the main street, who very promptly got out a car with “his best horse,” and a jarvey who would “surely take me over to Lismore inside of two hours and a half.”  He was as good as his master’s word, and a delightful drive it was, following the course of Spenser’s river, the Awniduffe, “which by the Englishman is called Blackwater.”  Nobody now calls it anything else.  The view of Youghal Harbour, as we made a great circuit by the bridge on leaving the town, was exceedingly fine.  Lying as it does within easy reach of Cork, this might be made a very pleasant summer halting-place for Americans landing at Queenstown, who now go further and probably fare worse.  One Western wanderer, with his family, Father Keller told me, did last year establish himself here, a Catholic from Boston, to whom a son was born, and who begged the Father to give the lad a local name in baptism, “the oldest he could think of.”

I should have thought St. Declan would have been “old” enough, or St. Nessan of “Ireland’s Eye,” or Saint Cartagh, who made Lismore a holy city, “into the half of which no woman durst enter,” sufficiently “local,” but Father Keller found in the Calendar a more satisfactory saint still in St. Goran or “Curran,” known also as St. Mochicaroen de Nona, from a change he made in the recitation of that part of the Holy Office.