teach in the schools or who attend visitors are absolved from the
vow.
*A hundred thousand welcomes.

Next came Dromana Castle, where the extraordinary old Countess of
Desmond was born,--the wonderful old lady whose supposed one hundred
and forty years so astonished posterity. She must have married
Thomas, twelfth Earl of Desmond, after 1505, as his first wife is
known to have been alive in that year. Raleigh saw her in 1589, and
she died in 1604: so it would seem that she must have been at least
one hundred and ten or one hundred and twelve when she met her
untimely death,--a death brought about entirely by her own youthful
impetuosity and her fondness for athletic sports. Robert Sydney,
second Earl of Leicester, makes the following reference to her in
his Table-Book, written when he was ambassador at Paris, about
1640:-

'The old Countess of Desmond was a marryed woman in Edward IV. time
in England, and lived till towards the end of Queen Elizabeth, so
she must needes be neare one hundred and forty yeares old. She had
a new sett of teeth not long afore her death, and might have lived
much longer had she not mett with a kinde of violent death; for she
would needes climbe a nut-tree to gather nuts; so falling down she
hurt her thigh, which brought a fever, and that fever brought death.
This my cousin Walter Fitzwilliam told me.'

It is true that the aforesaid cousin Walter may have been a better
raconteur than historian; still, local tradition vigorously opposes
any lessening of the number of the countess's years, pinning its
faith rather on one Hayman, who says that she presented herself at