remonstrance to prepare the feast for his guests. But she did not grace it with her presence; and when the company had assembled, and were engaged in merriment, she withdrew to her own apartment, to which she called her children, and after embracing them in a paroxysm of grief, which they could not account for, she took her original feathery covering from a press in which it had been kept, arrayed herself in it, and assuming her pristine shape, plunged into the lake, and was never seen afterwards. On the same night, O’Quin, again forgetful of the promises he had made her, engaged in play with Tiege-an-Cood O’Brien, the most distinguished of his guests, and lost the whole of his property. The reader is at liberty to believe as much or as little of this story as he pleases: but at all events the legend is valuable in a historical point of view, as indicating the period when the lands of Inchiquin passed into the hands of the O’Brien family; nor is it wholly improbable that under the guise of a wild legend may be concealed some indistinct tradition of such a real occurrence as that O’Quin made a union long kept hidden, with a person of inferior station, and that its discovery drew down upon his head the vengeance of his proud compeers, and led to their removal to another district of the chiefs of the clan Hy-Ifearnan. Be this, however, as it may, the ancient family of O’Quin--more fortunate than most other Irish families of noble origin--has never sunk into obscurity, or been without a representative of aristocratic rank; and it can at present boast of a representative among the nobility of the empire in the person of its justly presumed chief, the noble Earl of Dunraven. We have thus slightly touched on the history of the O’Quins, not only as it was connected with that of the locality which we had to illustrate, but also as necessary to correct a great error into which Burke and other modern genealogists have fallen in their accounts of the origin of the name and descent of this family. Thus it is stated by those writers that “the surname is derived from Con Ceadcaha, or Con of the hundred battles, monarch of Ireland in the second century, whose grandson was called Cuinn (rather O’Cuinn), that is, the descendant of Con, when he wielded the sceptre in 254.” But those writers should not have been ignorant that Con, which literally signifies the powerful, was a common name in Ireland both in Christian and Pagan times; and still more, they should not have been ignorant of the important fact for a genealogist, that the use of surnames was unknown in Ireland till the close of the tenth century. The story is altogether a silly fiction; and as the real origin of the family appears to be now unknown even to themselves, and as their pedigree has never as yet been printed, we are tempted to give it in an English form, translated from the original, preserved in the books of Lecan and Duald Mac Firbis:-- “Conor O’Quinn, the son of Donell,