The day was of astonishing clearness, yet, as so often happens in western Ireland, its clearness had nothing hard: the Atlantic blue was deep and sombre, the mountain shapes, exquisite in line, were vested in colour that had a magic and a mystery all their own. Sunlight across that brine-laden air, across those pungent expanses of bog, is never crudely definite in its revelation; there is a hint of romance and glamour in the pearly shimmer of its brightness. Clare has noble traditions: and no one should visit it without a pilgrimage to the castle of Carrigaholt on the Shannon estuary near Kilrush; for this was the ancestral home of that branch of the O'Briens who made the ancient name illustrious on every stricken field in Europe. They got their title, the Viscounts Clare, from Charles II, but after the Williamite wars they were attainted; and from Sarsfield's death onward it was always a Lord Clare who commanded the Irish Brigade--that wonderful fighting force whose chief recruiting ground was here in south-western Ireland. Two Lords Clare got their death at the head of their men, one at Massaglia in 1693 when Prince Eugene was beaten: the second at Ramillies, where in the general disaster the Irish Brigade not only saved its own colours, but carried two British standards back to Bruges. The third and last earl, who had refused restitution to all the estates and titles if only he would forswear his religion, led the immortal charge at Fontenoy, when Ireland's banished men snatched in a desperate feat of arms fierce requital for the penal laws that had left them a choice between exile and slavery. Among all the writers who ever handled that period of history, whatever their prepossessions, none ever wrote the name of "Clare's brigade", save with honour and admiration; and no nationalist poet has told their praise so eloquently as the Unionist, Miss Emily Lawless, in two sister poems. One of the two depicts the eve of Fontenoy in the exiles' camp, and the wild stirring in men's hearts. "The wind is wild to-night, and it seems to blow from Clare"--blows with a memory in it and a vision of all that has been left, blows with a promise of things long hoped for, since "Clare's brigade may claim its own" wherever the fight rages. "Send us, ye western breezes, our full, our rightful share, For faith and home and country and the ruined hearths of Clare." [Illustration: FERRYBANK, WATERFORD] And the second tells how, on the morrow of the battle, strange craft with strange bodiless sailors were seen on the Western coast, making swift way like homing birds to Corcabascinn, this westernmost barony of Clare. "Men of Corcabascinn, men of Clare's brigade, Hearken, stony hills of Clare, hear the charge we made, See us come together, singing from the fight, Back to Corcabascinn in the morning light."