Here now and then he was visited, it may be supposed, by old friends. Perhaps that distinguished son of the University of Cambridge, Gabriel Harvey, may for a while have been his guest; he is introduced under his pastoral name of Hobbinol, as present at the poet's house on his return to Ireland. The most memorable of these visits was that already alluded to--that paid to him in 1589 by Sir Walter Raleigh, with whom it will be remembered he had become acquainted some nine years before. Raleigh, too, had received a grant from the same huge forfeited estate, a fragment of which had been given to Spenser. The granting of these, and other shares of the Desmond estates, formed part of a policy then vigorously entertained by the English Government--the colonising of the so lately disordered and still restless districts of Southern Ireland. The recipients were termed 'undertakers;' it was one of their duties to repair the ravages inflicted during the recent tumults and bring the lands committed to them into some state of cultivation and order. The wars had been followed by a famine. 'Even in the history of Ireland,' writes a recent biographer of Sir Walter Raleigh, 'there are not many scenes more full of horror that those which the historians of that period rapidly sketch when showing us the condition of almost the whole province of Munster in the year 1584, and the years immediately succeeding.'{6} The claims of his duties as an 'undertaker,' in addition perhaps to certain troubles at court, where his rival Essex was at this time somewhat superseding him in the royal favour,{7} and making a temporary absence not undesirable, brought Raleigh into Cork County in 1589. A full account of this visit and its important results is given us in _Colin Clouts Come Home Again_, which gives us at the same time a charming picture of the poet's life at Kilcolman. Colin himself, lately returned home from England, tells his brother shepherds, at their urgent request, of his 'passed fortunes.' He begins with Raleigh's visit. One day, he tells them, as he sat Under the foote of Mole, that mountaine hore, Keeping my sheepe amongst the cooly shade Of the greene alders by the Mullaes shore, a strange shepherd, who styled himself the Shepherd of the Ocean -- Whether allured with my pipes delight, Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about, Or thither led by chaunce, I know not right -- found him out, and Provoked me to plaie some pleasant fit. He sang, he tells us, a song of Mulla old father Mole's daughter, and of another river called Bregog who loved her. Then his guest sang in turn:--