At Glin we pass beneath the ancient stronghold of the "Knight of Glin," which recalls the splendor of a feudal potentate who in Queen Elizabeth's time was lord of an estate of six hundred thousand acres, and whose personal train included five hundred gentlemen. So much glory and an Irish tendency to take a hand in the frequent broils in the west, brought the English Lord President of Ireland with a strong besieging force. The defense was desperate in the extreme. The young son of the lord of the castle was captured by the besiegers and placed in a post of great danger in hope of checking the fire of the garrison; but the ruse had no effect on the furious Irishmen in the fortress. When at last a breach had been made by a heavy cannonade and the fall of the castle became inevitable, the few remaining defenders, uttering the ancient warcry of their house, flung themselves from the shattered battlements into the river. After a lapse of more than three hundred years, one may still see the marks of the cannon-shot upon the heavy walls. And this weird story of the defense of Glin Castle is typical of tales that may be told of hundreds of the mouldering ruins of Ireland. At Foynes the river broadens still more; "the spacious Shenan, spreading like a sea," was how it impressed Edmund Spenser, who has left in his poems many traces of his Irish wanderings. But we see little of it in the increasing drizzle that envelops it. Our road turns farther inland to Askeaton, a bedraggled collection of little huts, beneath the lordly ruin of Desmond Castle. There is little else to engage us on our way to Limerick, though we pass through the Vale of Adare, of which the bard has so musically sung: "O sweet Adare, O lovely vale, O safe retreat of sylvan splendor; Nor summer sun nor morning gale E'er hailed a scene so sweetly tender." But it is not so sweetly tender on a dark drizzly evening, and we rush on through the rain to the shelter of an old-time hostelry in Limerick.