A little farther on are the ruins of a church surrounded by a silent battalion of gravestones. It was the Abbey of Kilbarrack, and one of the tombstones, badly defaced, marks the burial place of Francis Higgins, a detested government spy who betrayed Lord Edward Fitzgerald to the government in the insurrection of 1798. He is known as "The Sham Squire," because for a time he succeeded in passing himself off as a country gentleman of wealth and was married to a lady of good family. When the fraud was detected he was sent to jail, and she died of shame and mortification. Being boycotted by all honorable men, he became a spy and informer, and popular hatred pursued him to the graveyard, which had to be watched because the people resented his burial in consecrated ground and would have thrown his body into the bay. The car line follows the curves of the coast down to the shore of the Irish Sea, where a monstrous mass of rocks, covered with heather and rhododendrons and gorse, now as yellow as gold, rises five hundred or six hundred feet, with here and there a dense mass of foliage. It is known as the Hill of Howth, and is considered one of the most picturesque places in Ireland. At its foot is the village of Howth, and on either side are the ruins of ancient strongholds, located so as to command the entrance to the harbor. The title of the Earl of Howth dates back to 1177, and was bestowed in battle. It has been held honorably by the Lawrence family, one of the oldest in Ireland. They won their name and their lands by the sword. The founder of the house was Amory Tristam, a Norman adventurer, who followed Strongbow to the conquest of Ireland, and has been immortalized in Wagner's opera, "Tristam and Isolde." While Tristam, loyal knight and true, was attending a red-haired Irish princess to her destined husband, the King of Cornwall, they drank by mistake a love potion which bound them forever in a frenzied romance. It ended with Tristam dying in his castle and Isolde coming over the sea to perish like Juliet upon her husband's lifeless form. Amory Tristam assumed the name of St. Lawrence, because of a great victory that he won over the Danes on the anniversary of that saint; and Howth Castle has been the seat of the family from the beginning. A long line of overlords lie under the shadow of a ruined old abbey, and the present earl, William Ulick Tristam St. Lawrence, must join them soon, because he is more than eighty years of age. He was a member of parliament in his younger days, succeeded to the earldom in 1874, and until he became too feeble was a famous sport. His son and heir, Thomas Tristam St. Lawrence, is a man of fifty, who married the daughter of Benjamin Lee Guinness, the great brewer of Dublin, and inherited many millions from her father.