At one time, "The Tribes of the Saints" seem to have increased to such an extent that they threatened to absorb all others. In West Ireland especially, little hermitages sprung up in companies of dozens and hundreds, all over the rock-strewn wastes, and along the sad shores of the Atlantic, dotting themselves like sea gulls upon barren points of rock, or upon sandy wastes which would barely have sufficed, one might think, to feed a goat. We see their remains still--so tiny, yet so enduring--in the Isles of Arran; upon a dozen rocky points all round the bleak edges of Connemara; in the wild mountain glens of the Burren--set often with an admirable selection of site, in some sloping dell with, perhaps, a stream slipping lightly by and hurrying to lose itself in the ground, always with a well or spring brimming freshly over--an object still of reverence to the neighbouring peasants. Thanks to the innate stability of their material, thanks, too, to the super-abundance of stone in these regions, which makes them no temptation to the despoiler, they remain, roofless but otherwise pretty much as they were. We can look back across a dozen centuries with hardly the change of a detail. [Illustration: CROSS IN CEMETERY OF TEMPUL BRECCAIN, ARANMOR. _From a drawing by M. Stokes (after Sir F.W. Burton_).] In these little western monasteries each cell stood as a rule by itself, containing--one would say very tightly containing--a single inmate. In other places, large buildings, however, were erected, and great numbers of monks lived together. Some of these larger communities are stated to have actually contained several thousand brethren, and though this sounds like an exaggeration, there can be no doubt that they were enormously populous. The native mode of existence lent itself, in fact, very readily to the arrangement. It was merely the clan or sept re-organized upon a religious footing. "Les premières grands monastères de l'Irelande," says M. de Montalembert in his "Moines d'Occident," "ne furent done autre chose à vrai dire qui des _clans_, reorganisés sous une forme religieuse." New clans, that is to say, cut out of the old ones, their fealty simply transferred from a chief to an abbot, who was almost invariably in the first instance of chieftain blood. "Le prince, en se faisant moine, devenait naturellement abbé, et restait ainsi dans la vie monastique, ce qu'il avait èté dans la vie sèculière le chef de sa race et de son clan."