Froude takes up the tale:--“If Fynes Moryson may be believed, the daughters of distinguished Ulster chiefs squatted on the pavement round the hall fires of their father’s castles, in the presence of strangers, as bare of clothing as if Adam had never sinned.” Here we see the “women,” who, for all the original story has to tell us, might be servants, dependants, or refugees gathered in from the war and pillage by which O’Cahan’s country was then ravaged, are transformed into “daughters of chiefs,” the “house” turns into “pavements” by the “hall-fires of castles,” and the incident has become a universal custom. Then Professor Mahaffy arrives with a series of versions. “O’Cahan, though living in a hovel, could speak Latin.” More particularly, it was a shantie of mud and wattles, without rafters, and the cattle and swine occupied the same room as the masters; so he explains in a lecture on “Elizabethan Ireland.” A more circumstantial account appears in “An Epoch in Irish History.” In this the traveller is received by the “ladies of the chieftain’s household.” “They brought him into the thatched cabin which was their residence,” and throwing off their mantles invited him to do likewise before the chief came in--an invitation which the unknown “women” of the baron’s tale did not give. The baron’s “house” has already changed into castles with pavements, then into a hovel, and a thatched cabin, but the picture of savagery is not yet lurid enough, and there is a further transformation which, possibly from its supposed importance, is dragged into a description of society in the Dublin Georgian houses of the 18th century. “The O’Cahan in his wigwam, surrounded by his stark naked wives (why not squaws?) and daughters, addressed the astonished foreign visitor in fluent Latin.” The “wigwam” and the “wives” show the unimpaired fertility of Professor Mahaffy’s imagination. His pronouncements, the _Irish Times_ assures us of this essay, “carry historical value of the highest degree.” It will be interesting to watch his further adornments of his favourite tale. It will also be interesting to see how long professors of Trinity College will still invite Irish students to enter there by offering this curious bait of conventional insults to their race and country, and new varieties of old slanders.