How his eyes must have filled as he glanced in memory over the long tale of his country's sufferings, on the record of which he was about to enter. 'Twas bad enough to see the Dane lay sacrilegious hands on the sacred vessels; but it was worse still to behold one's fellow-Catholic apply the robber's torch to the church of God where, perhaps, at that very moment our Lord himself lay hid under the sacramental veils. Yet these were the men who, from the Loire to the Jordan had fought the church's battle so gallantly,--whose countrymen would only hold the Calabrian kingdom, that their lances had purchased so dearly, as vassals of the Pope,--the very men who themselves were studding the Pale with those architectural gems, of which the ruins of Dunbrody and its sister abbeys still speak so eloquently. It was a strange fancy that made them tumble the Irish monastery to-day, and lay the foundation of an Anglo-Irish one to-morrow. Yet so it was; for in the charters of many of those monasteries, in which, it was enacted in 1380, that no mere Irishman should be allowed to take vows, the name of John De Courcy is entered as founder or benefactor. One hardly knows whether to condemn him for destroying Columba's favorite abbey, or praise him for the solicitude he expresses in his letter to the Pope for the proper preservation of Columba's relics. The acts of the man and his nation are so contradictory, that the only reasonable conclusion we can draw from them is the practical one, never again to wonder that the faith of such men withered at the first blast of persecution. Nevertheless, the monastery survived these attacks; for in the early part of the fifteenth century, we find the then abbot of Derry negotiating a peace between the English and O'Donnell. But in its subsequent annals nothing more than the mere date of an inmate's death meets us till we come to the great catastrophe, which ended at once the monastery and order of Columba. Cox thus tells the story: "Colonel Saintlow succeeded Randolph in the command of the garrison and lived as quietly as could be desired, for the rebels were so daunted by the former defeat that they did not dare to make any new attempt; but unluckily on the 24th of April, 1566, the ammunition took fire and blew up the town and fort of Derry, so that the soldiers were obliged to embark for Dublin."[4] "This disaster was regarded at the time as a divine chastisement for the profanation of St. Columba's church and cell, the latter being used by the heretical soldiery as a repository of ammunition, while the former was defiled by their profane worship."[5] J. MCH. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Sampson.] [Footnote 2: Cardinal Moran "Irish Saints in G. Brit." p 121.] [Footnote 3: Theiner. Mon. Vat. p. 48.]