Years have passed since these scenes were witnessed by the writer of these pages. The old familiar church has been pulled down (a new one built on a neighbouring site), and nought of it remains but the ivy-clad tower and graceful spire left standing—that ‘ivy-mantled tower,’ where the sparrow had found her a house and the swallow a nest; whose green depths in the still eventide were made vocal by the chirpings and chatterings of its feathered inhabitants—the sparrows fluttering fussily in and out, and after the manner of their kind, closing the day in noisy gossip before subsiding into rest and silence. Here too were to be found owls, curiously light—soft masses of feathers with apparently no bodies to speak of, who captured by the workmen while clipping the ivy, were brought up, all dazed-looking and sleepy, to be admired and wondered at by the rectory children, and finally restored tenderly to their ‘secret bower!’ A funeral scene similar to that just described forms the subject of one of the illustrations in Lady Chatterton’s _Rambles in the South of Ireland_, sketched by herself. She had stopped to make a drawing of the beautiful ruins of Quin Abbey in the County Clare, when the wail of an approaching funeral came floating on the breeze, and the melancholy cadence was soon followed by the appearance of the usual concourse of country people. Their figures scattered about in groups, and the coffin in the foreground, enter with very picturesque effect into the sketch. When the funeral is over, those who have attended it disperse through the churchyard; and any having friends buried there betake themselves to their graves to pray and weep over them. The wild bursts of grief and vehement sobbing, even over moss-grown graves whose time-stained headstones bear witness to the length of time their occupants have slept beneath, would surprise those who are unfamiliar with the impulsive and demonstrative Irish nature. An old man sitting beside a grave was rocking himself to and fro, and wiping his eyes with a blue cotton handkerchief, while, rosary in hand, he prayed with extraordinary fervour.