After resting sufficiently, O’Donnell proceeded to Tyrconnel, where he was joyfully received by his people. His father, old and unenterprising, determined to abdicate the chieftaincy in his favor, and, accordingly, Red Hugh was proclaimed “The O’Donnell,” with all the ancient forms. He proceeded with characteristic rigor to baptize his new honors in the blood of his foes. Old Turlough O’Neill had weakly permitted an English garrison to occupy his castle of Strabane. O’Donnell attacked it furiously and put all of the garrison to the sword. He followed up this warlike blow with many others, and soon struck terror into the hearts of all the “Englishry” and their much more despicable Irish allies, on the borders of Ulster and Connaught. His most active and efficient ally in these stirring operations was Hugh McGuire, Prince of Fermanagh—the best cavalry commander produced by either party during the long and devastating Elizabethan wars. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IV Confiscation of Desmond’s Domains—English Plantation of Munster THERE had been, of course, a general “confiscation to the Crown”—that is, to the English “carpet-baggers”—of the broad domains of the defeated Desmonds, and their allies, and among the aliens who profited greatly thereby, for a time, at least, were the poetic Edmund Spenser, who obtained the castle and lands of Kilcolman, in Cork, and Sir Walter Raleigh, who fell in for extensive holdings in Youghal, at the mouth of the southern Blackwater, and its neighborhood. In the garden of Myrtle Grove House, Sir Walter’s Youghal residence, potatoes, obtained from Virginia, were first planted in Ireland, and the first pipeful of tobacco was smoked. In connection with the latter event, a story is told that a servant-girl, about to scrub the floors, seeing smoke issuing from Sir Walter’s nose and mouth, conceived him to be on fire, and emptied the contents of her pail over him, in order, as she explained, “to put him out.” Sir Walter, we may be sure, did not relish her method of fighting “the fire fiend.”