Lysterby, I have since been informed, is an ugly little town; but in those remote, uncritical days it appeared to me the centre of loveliness. Flowers are rare in Ireland, and here roses, red and white, grew wild and luxuriant along the lanes. But to an imaginative and romantic child, a place so peopled with legend and gay and tragic historical figures could not fail to be beautiful. In one of the common streets you looked up and saw the painted bust of a medieval knave, craning his ruffianly neck out of a window-frame, and the fellow, you were told, answered to the name of Peeping Tom. Instantly the street ceased to be real, and you were pitched pell-mell into the heart of romance. I have not seen the place since childhood; but it remains in memory blotted, fragmentary, picturesque, an old-fashioned little town, with spired churches, rough, clean little streets, rare passers-by, never so hurried that the double file from the Ivies, under the guard of the austere ladies of Mercy, did not attract their attention, and sometimes with discomposing emphasis, as when the little street blackguards would shout after us:-- "Catholics, Catholics, quack, quack, quack, Go to the devil and never come back!" I remember the Craven Arms, a medieval inn all hung with roses and ivy, where my parents stayed when they came to see me, and where my sister and I slept in a long low-beamed chamber, with windows made of a surprising pattern of tiny diamond squares and green lattices that excited our enthusiastic admiration. I remember the bowling-green, that appeared to roll like a sea straight to the sky, and the long, long roads with fields on either side, and the great historic ruin that has given its name to one of Scott's novels.