"My dear friend, you were an old and valued scholar of mine: on one occasion you were the means of saving my life, and on many subsequent occasions of providing for its comforts. I am now going to die. I have no child to whom I might leave the little I possess, nor have I any near of kin who might prefer any claim to it; in either case the treasure I possess and which I hold dear as life should not have left the family of Mulholland, in which it has been for ages and generations handed down. But I am the last of my race and you are the best friend I have. I therefore give it to you, and when I am gone, dig in the garden at a certain spot, and you will find a box there: take it up and treasure its contents for my sake." Mr. MacClean dug in the place indicated and found an oak box within which lay the bell and its shrine and beside them a worn copy of Bedell's quarto Irish Bible. Mr. MacClean had the precious relic in his possession for a number of years, but unhappily he did not at first keep it under lock and key. The result was what might have been foretold by any one acquainted with the depredations committed by the enlightened vermin known as "relic-hunters." Priceless bits of gold tracery were stolen by the servants and visitors until the cruelly denuded panels aroused Mr. MacClean to a sense of his danger. He then locked up the shrine. Mr. MacClean willed the bell and its shrine to Dr. Todd, the great Irish authority on Saint Patrick, and by him in turn it was bequeathed back to the nation at large, who leave it to the care of the Royal Irish Academy as its keepers. We have now traced the history of this bell back through the long vista of fourteen centuries. During most of that time it was venerated as a relic of great sanctity and the humanizing influence of this feeling must have helped these poor benighted savages of Ireland whom Saint Patrick came to teach and save. The religious sanctity of the bell is gone, but its mission is not thereby ended. The worship of the beautiful has also its humanizing and elevating influence. * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: 1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_. 2. Images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break. 3. Footnotes have been renumbered and moved from the end of the page to the end of the paragraph in which they appear. 4. The phrase "Oeil de Boeuf" uses oe ligature in the original. 5. Macron over a vowel is indicated using equality sign followed by the vowel itself within square brackets. For instance, vowel i with macron is represented by [=i].