CHAPTER I

The Jacobite's Legacy

In my youth I heard a great many Irish family traditions, more or less
of a supernatural character, some of them very peculiar, and all, to a
child at least, highly interesting. One of these I will now relate,
though the translation to cold type from oral narrative, with all the
aids of animated human voice and countenance, and the appropriate
_mise-en-scene_ of the old-fashioned parlour fireside and its listening
circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of
leafless boughs, with the occasional rattle of the clumsy old
window-frame behind shutter and curtain, as the blast swept by, is at
best a trying one.

About midway up the romantic glen of Cappercullen, near the point where
the counties of Limerick, Clare, and Tipperary converge, upon the then
sequestered and forest-bound range of the Slieve-Felim hills, there
stood, in the reigns of the two earliest Georges, the picturesque and
massive remains of one of the finest of the Anglo-Irish castles of
Munster--perhaps of Ireland.

It crowned the precipitous edge of the wooded glen, itself half-buried
among the wild forest that covered that long and solitary range. There
was no human habitation within a circle of many miles, except the
half-dozen hovels and the small thatched chapel composing the little
village of Murroa, which lay at the foot of the glen among the
straggling skirts of the noble forest.

Its remoteness and difficulty of access saved it from demolition. It was
worth nobody's while to pull down and remove the ponderous and clumsy
oak, much less the masonry or flagged roofing of the pile. Whatever
would pay the cost of removal had been long since carried away. The rest
was abandoned to time--the destroyer.

The hereditary owners of this noble building and of a wide territory in
the contiguous counties I have named, were English--the De Lacys--long
naturalized in Ireland. They had acquired at least this portion of their
estate in the reign of Henry VIII, and held it, with some vicissitudes,
down to the establishment of the revolution in Ireland, when they
suffered attainder, and, like other great families of that period,
underwent a final eclipse.

The De Lacy of that day retired to France, and held a brief command in
the Irish Brigade, interrupted by sickness. He retired, became a poor
hanger-on of the Court of St. Germains, and died early in the eighteenth
century--as well as I rememb