It is a huge place--huge, ungainly, and uselessly extensive; built
at a time when, at any rate in Ireland, men considered neither
beauty, aptitude, nor economy. It is three stories high, and stands
round a quadrangle, in which there are two entrances opposite to
each other. Nothing can be well uglier than that great paved court,
in which there is not a spot of anything green, except where the
damp has produced an unwholesome growth upon the stones; nothing can
well be more desolate. And on the outside of the building matters
are not much better. There are no gardens close up to the house, no
flower-beds in the nooks and corners, no sweet shrubs peeping in at
the square windows. Gardens there are, but they are away, half a
mile off; and the great hall door opens out upon a flat, bleak park,
with hardly a scrap around it which courtesy can call a lawn.

Here, at this period of ours, lived Clara, Countess of Desmond,
widow of Patrick, once Earl of Desmond, and father of Patrick, now
Earl of Desmond. These Desmonds had once been mighty men in their
country, ruling the people around them as serfs, and ruling them
with hot iron rods. But those days were now long gone, and tradition
told little of them that was true. How it had truly fared either
with the earl, or with their serfs, men did not well know; but
stories were ever being told of walls built with human blood, and of
the devil bearing off upon his shoulder a certain earl who was in
any other way quite unbearable, and depositing some small unburnt
portion of his remains fathoms deep below the soil in an old burying
ground near Kanturk. And there had been a good earl, as is always
the case with such families; but even his virtues, according to
tradition, had been of a useless namby-pamby sort. He had walked to
the shrine of St. Finbar, up in the little island of the Gougane