offend chaste eyes, desired him to sit down with them. Soon after,
O'Kane, the lord of the country, came in all naked, except a loose
mantle and shoes, which he put off as soon as he came in; and,
entertaining the Baron after his best manner in the Latin tongue,
desired him to put off his apparel, which he thought to be a burden
to him, and to sit naked.

"'To conclude, men and women at night going to sleep, he thus naked
in a round circle about the fire, with their feet towards it. They
fold their heads and their upper parts in woollen mantles, first
steeped in water to keep them warm; for they say, that woollen
cloth, wetted, preserves heat (as linen, wetted, preserves cold),
when the smoke of their bodies has warmed the woollen cloth.'

"The cause of this extreme poverty, and of its long continuance, we
must conclude, arose from the peculiar laws of property which were
in force under the Irish dynasties. These laws have been described
by most writers as similar to the Kentish custom of gavelkind; and,
indeed, so little attention was paid to the subject, that were it
not for the researches of Sir J. Davis, the knowledge of this
singular usage would have been entirely lost.

"The Brehon law of property, he tells us, was similar to the custom
(as the English lawyers term it) of hodge-podge. When any one of
the sept died, his lands did not descend to his sons, but were
divided among the whole sept: and, for this purpose, the chief of
the sept made a new division of the whole lands belonging to the
sept, and gave every one his part according to seniority. So that
no man had a property which could descend to his children; and even
during his own life his possession of any particular spot was quite