vices more willingly than in their virtues.” More than forty years had elapsed since that famous battle of Clontarf, and since Ragnvald, Reginald, or Ranald, son of Sigtryg the Norseman, had been slain therein by Brian Boru. On that one day, so the Irish sang, the Northern invaders were exterminated, once and for all, by the Milesian hero, who had craftily used the strangers to fight his battles, and then, the moment they became formidable to himself, crushed them, till “from Howth to Brandon in Kerry there was not a threshing-floor without a Danish slave threshing thereon, or a quern without a Danish woman grinding thereat.” Nevertheless, in spite of the total annihilation of the Danish power in the Emerald isle, Ranald seemed to the eyes of men to be still a hale old warrior, ruling constitutionally--that is, with a wholesome fear of being outlawed or murdered if he misbehaved--over the Danes in Waterford; with five hundred fair-haired warriors at his back, two-edged axe on shoulder and two-edged sword on thigh. His ships drove a thriving trade with France and Spain in Irish fish, butter, honey, and furs. His workmen coined money in the old round tower of Dundory, built by his predecessor and namesake about the year 1003, which stands as Reginald’s tower to this day. He had fought many a bloody battle since his death at Clontarf, by the side of his old leader Sigtryg Silkbeard. He had been many a time to Dublin to visit his even more prosperous and formidable friend; and was so delighted with the new church of the Holy Trinity, which Sigtryg and his bishop Donatus had just built, not in the Danish or Ostman town, but in the heart of ancient Celtic Dublin, (plain proof of the utter overthrow of the Danish power,) that he had determined to build a like church in honor of the Holy Trinity, in Waterford itself. A thriving, valiant old king he seemed, as he sat in his great house of pine logs under Reginald’s Tower upon the quay, drinking French and Spanish wines out of horns of ivory and cups of gold; and over his head hanging, upon the wall, the huge doubled-edged axe with which, so his flatterers had whispered, Brian Boru had not slain him, but he Brian Boru. Nevertheless, then as since, alas! the pleasant theory was preferred by the Milesian historians to the plain truth. And far away inland, monks wrote and harpers sung of the death of Ranald, the fair-haired Fiongall, and all his “mailed swarms.”