As we proceeded, he delivered the following legend. The old man’s phraseology was copious and energetic, qualities which I have vainly striven to infuse into the translation; for an abler pen would fail in our colder English of doing justice to the very poetical language of the narrator. “Many a biting March has passed over the heads of men since Colonel Barry lived at Lisnegar. He was of the true blood of the old Strongbow chiefs, who became sovereign princes in the land; and forming alliances with the ancient owners of the soil, renounced the Saxon connection and name. This noble family gloried in the title of M’Adam;[3] and the colonel did not shame his descent. He kept open house for all comers, and every day an ox was killed and consumed at Lisnegar. All the gentlemen of the province thronged thither, hunting and hawking, and feasting and coshering; while the hall was crowded with harpers and pipers, _caroughs_ and _buckaughs_, and _shanachies_ and story-tellers, who came and went as they pleased, in constant succession. I myself,” said the old man, sighing, “have seen a remnant of these good old times, but now they are vanished for ever; the genius of hospitality has retired from the chieftain’s hall to the hovel on the moor; and the wanderer turns with a sigh from lofty groves and stately towers, to the shelter of the peasant’s shed! David Barry and his seven brothers lived with M’Adam, and were of his own name and race; and whether he enjoyed the sport of the chase, or took the diversion of shooting, or moved among the high and titled of the land, they always accompanied him, and formed a sort of body-guard, to share his sports or assert his quarrels. At that time, on the banks of the Bride, near the ruined tower of Shanacloch, lived a man named Edmund Barry. A thick and briary covert on his farm had been for many years the haunt of a fox celebrated all over the south of Ireland for the extraordinary speed and prowess he evinced in the many attempts made to hunt him down. Many gallant and noble huntsmen sought the honour of bearing home his brush, but in vain; and it was a remarkable fact, that after tiring out both hounds and horses in the arduous pursuit, and though his flight might extend over a considerable part of the province, he invariably returned at night to his favourite covert. A treaty of peace, it would seem, had been tacitly instituted between Edmund Barry and the fox. Barry’s poultry for a series of years, whether they sought the banks of the Bride or the neighbourhood of the barn door, never suffered by the dangerous vicinity: Reynard would mix with Barry’s dogs and spend an hour of social intercourse with them, as familiarly as if he belonged to the same species; and Barry gave his wild crafty friend the same protection and licence that he permitted his own domestic curs. The fame of this strange union of interests was well known; and to this day the memory of Barry’s _madra roc_ survives in the traditions of the