Next remark that the Colonel keeps those 150 “volunteers” at work upon the Round Towers in the midst of a raging war;--after he had before affirmed that they could only be erected in a season of profound peace--for a complete century. During this whole time they must, of course, have availed themselves of the assistance of the inhabitants; and is it not marvellous that, during that long time “the ancient Irishman”--and “Pat’s nae stupid fellow,” as the Colonel himself avows--should not have been able to pick up a single insight into the arcana of the masonic art?--but that soon as ever the dear externs expired,--who at the period of their arrival must have been, at least, over twenty years of age each, and who, to accomplish Montmorency’s miracle, must have every one of them lived just one hundred years more, and then died, all in one day!--is it not _petrifying_, I say, that soon as ever this appalling catastrophe occurred, every vestige of those “fairy” masons should have vanished along with them?--and the country, in a _paralysis_, have forgotten to associate them with the Towers, as if stupefied with the incantation of a wizard or a talisman! And yet this was not the greatest injustice of which the poor Cœnobites got reason to complain; but it _is_ that, when the people had recovered from the delirium of their late trance, and began to look abroad for some “authors” on whom to _father_ those edifices, they unanimously, though unaccountably, agreed to lay them at the door of the “O’Rorkes” and the “MacCarthy Mores”! It so happens that the last of the MacCarthy Mores was my _own_ maternal grandfather; and he, venerable and venerated old gentleman, apt as he was, in the evening of his faded life, to revert to the mutability of worldly possessions, never for a moment bestowed a solitary thought upon the alienation of the property of those columnar masonries. Often used he to mention the Castles of Palace and of Blarney: Castlemain and Glenflesk used still oftener to grace his talk; but oftener still, and with more apparent delectation, would he dilate on the _Castle_ of Macroom and the _Abbey_ of Mucruss,--all, as the creation of _immediate_ or _collateral_ branches of his family; but never, in the catalogue of his patrimonial spoliations did he enumerate a Round Tower, or lay a shadow of claim to their construction.