But spring was at hand, and the Lismore orchards were in blossom. The Earl was busy buying more lands and manors to be settled on Robyn, and writing to his English friends about a “ffrench gent” to accompany his sons Kynalmeaky and Broghill as “governour” on their foreign travels. Great sheet-winged hawks, also, were brought “to fflye for our sports”; and in July Lord Clifford and his suite arrived from Yorkshire on a visit to Lismore. The Earl of Cork was in his element. A great hunting-party had been arranged, and the huntsmen filled the lodge in the park. Dungarvan and his wife—Lord Clifford’s daughter and heiress—the Barrymores, and Katharine and Arthur Jones, were all gathered at Lismore. Lord Clifford was to see this Munster home at its very best; its terraces and rose-gardens aflame with colour, its orchards heavy with fruit, its pigeon-houses and watermills and fishponds and the great turreted walls—all the “re-edifications” in fact, that had been the work of years. And the seventeenth-century interior must have been as imposing; for there was furniture of crimson velvet, fringed with silver, and furniture of black and scarlet velvet brocade. The walls were hung with tapestry, the floors were spread with Turkey rugs. There were high-backed chairs and low-backed chairs, and Indian embroideries, and “long cushions” for the embrasured window-seats. The Earl’s hospitable tables were furnished with fish, beef, venison, and huge all-containing pies—to be washed down by Bordeaux wine, usquebagh, and _aqua vitæ_; and they groaned also beneath their burden of silver;—flagons and trenchers, “covered salts,” “costerns,” kettles and ladles of silver and silver gilt; while the “ewers and basons” in the bedrooms were of silver, the great gilded beds hung with scarlet cloth and silver lace and the ceilings of the children’s nursery and the Earl’s “studdie” were of “fretwork”—their walls of “Spanish white”. Katharine and Arthur Jones went back to Athlone early in September. The hunting-party was dispersed, and the House of Lismore was emptying again. It must have been on one of those autumn days before Katharine left Lismore that there happened the little “foolish” incident about Robyn and the plums: an incident which the elder sister would tell, long afterwards, when Robert Boyle had made his world-wide reputation, and she and he were growing old together in the house in Pall Mall.[35]