This was the habitation of The Macnamaras, hereditary kings of Munster, and here it was that the existing representative of the royal family lived with his only son, Standish O'Dermot Macnamara. In front of the pile stretched a park, or rather what had once been a park, but which was now wild and tangled as any wood. It straggled down to the coastway of the lough, which, with as many windings as a Norwegian fjord, brought the green waves of the Atlantic for twenty miles between coasts a thousand feet in height--coasts which were black and precipitous and pierced with a hundred mighty caves about the headlands of the entrance, but which became wooded and more gentle of slope towards the narrow termination of the basin. The entire of one coastway, from the cliffs that broke the wild buffet of the ocean rollers, to the little island that lay at the narrowing of the waters, was the property of The Macnamara. This was all that had been left to the house which had once held sway over two hundred miles of coastway, from the kingdom of Kerry to Achill Island, and a hundred miles of riverway. Pasturages the richest of the world, lake-lands the most beautiful, mountains the grandest, woods and moors--all had been ruled over by The Macnamaras, and of all, only a strip of coastway and a ruined castle remained to the representative of the ancient house, who was now passing on a jaunting-car between the dilapidated pillars at the entrance to his desolate demesne. On a small hill that came in sight so soon as the car had passed from under the gaunt fantastic branches that threw themselves over the wall at the roadside, as if making a scrambling clutch at something indefinite in the air, a ruined tower stood out in relief against the blue sky of this August day. Seeing the ruin in this land of ruins The Macnamara sighed heavily--too heavily to allow of any one fancying that his emotion was natural. “Ah, my son, the times have changed,” he said. “Only a few years have passed--six hundred or so--since young Brian Macnamara left that very castle to ask the daughter of the great Desmond of the Lake in marriage. How did he go out, my boy?” “You don't mean that we are now----” “How did he go out?” again asked The Macnamara, interrupting his son's words of astonishment. “He went out of that castle with three hundred and sixty-five knights--for he had as many knights as there are days in the year.”--Here Eugene, who only caught the phonetic sense of this remarkable fact regarding young Brian Macnamara, gave a grin, which his master detected and chastised by a blow from his stick upon the mighty livery coat. “But, father,” said Standish, after the trifling excitement occasioned by this episode had died away--“but, father, we are surely not going----”