At that time I had never seen Ireland but as an infant at my mother's
breast.




CHAPTER III.

IRELAND RE-VISITED.


I was a boy of about 12 when I first re-visited Ireland; and, as the
steamer entered Carlingford Lough, which to my mind almost equals
Killarney's beauty--but that, perhaps, is a Northman's prejudice--with
the noble range of the Mourne mountains on the one side and the
Carlingford Hills on the other, it seemed to my young imagination like a
glimpse of fairy land.

Carlingford reminded me of what my old masters, the Christian Brothers,
used to teach us, that those places ending in "ford" had at one time
been Norse settlements. There is not the slightest trace, I should say,
of people of Norse descent along this coast now, unless we accept the
theory that would regard as such the descendants of the Norman De
Courcy's followers, who can be recognised by their names, and are still
to be found, side by side, and intermingling with those of the original
Celtic children of the soil in the barony of Lecale. It is astonishing,
by the way, how you still find in Ireland, after centuries of successive
confiscations, the old names in their old tribal lands, mingled in
places, as in Lecale, with the Norman names; the two races being now