Galway town, once you have entered it, is depressing beyond words, but also more picturesque than any town in Ireland. A hundred years ago it was the greatest port of the country, in its own way a rival to Bristol and Liverpool. Those were the days of small towns, and Galway numbered forty thousand people. To-day the population is barely fourteen thousand--but it is not the drop in numbers that signifies most. Go about the streets and you will find tall, solid buildings of black stone built very high, for the town was walled and space was scarce in it. Some of these were dwelling-houses, and over their doorways are the great scutcheons carved in stone belonging to this or that one of the thirteen "tribes"--Blakes, Lynches, Bodkins, Brownes, Skerrets, Kirwans, Morrises, Ffrenches, Martins, and the rest--names which to-day sound Irish of the Irish, yet which in truth belonged to English settlers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who established here a flourishing merchant community. In those early days the great trade was with Spain; for a glance at the map will show how short a run it is from the west of Ireland to that other western outpost of Europe--a run which can be made either way with the prevailing westerly wind. "Spanish Parade" keeps its memorial of that traffic, but more clearly is it preserved by a famous story. In the wall which surrounds the old Church of St. Nicholas is a stone engraven with skull and crossbones, and a recent inscription commemorating the austere virtue of James Lynch Fitzstephen, Mayor of Galway in 1493. The Mayor was a merchant in close commerce with Spain, and on one of his journeys he brought back with him a young Spaniard, son of his host and friend. But at home in Galway, quarrel broke out (it is said, over a lady) between Lynch's own son and his guest, and the Galway man stabbed the Spaniard. For his offence he was arraigned, and his father passed sentence of death; but a compassionate horror seized the townspeople, and none would execute the sentence. So, that justice might be done, the laws of hospitality asserted--and perhaps, too, lest there should be a break in the friendly relations with Spain--Lynch Fitzstephen hanged his son with his own hand. In the church, a fine building of the fourteenth century, are many monuments of the "tribes"--but of more interest are the mansions: chief of them the "Lynch House", standing in the main street and richly decorated with stone mouldings. Nearer the port are huge buildings of more recent date, grain-stores erected in the early eighteenth century when a tremendous export trade to England ran from this port. All of them, or all but all, mansions and stores alike, have fallen on evil days, and you shall see the decorated scutcheon over the entrance to some rookery of wretched tenements. [Illustration: IN THE PASS OF DELPHI, KILLARY BAY]