ant glimpses of fairy-land; something of her
gravely-pleasant countenance, plain, but refined and ladylike, with
that kindly mystery in her side-long glance and uplifted finger, which
indicated the approaching climax of a tale of wonder.

Lough Guir is a kind of centre of the operations of the Munster
fairies. When a child is stolen by the "good people," Lough Guir is
conjectured to be the place of its unearthly transmutation from the
human to the fairy state. And beneath its waters lie enchanted, the
grand old castle of the Desmonds, the great earl himself, his
beautiful young countess, and all the retinue that surrounded him in
the years of his splendour, and at the moment of his catastrophe.

Here, too, are historic associations. The huge square tower that rises
at one side of the stable-yard close to the old house, to a height
that amazed my young eyes, though robbed of its battlements and one
story, was a stronghold of the last rebellious Earl of Desmond, and is
specially mentioned in that delightful old folio, the _Hibernia
Pacata_, as having, with its Irish garrison on the battlements, defied
the army of the lord deputy, then marching by upon the summits of the
overhanging hills. The house, built under shelter of this stronghold
of the once proud and turbulent Desmonds, is old, but snug, with a
multitude of small low rooms, such as I have seen in houses of the
same age in Shropshire and the neighbouring English counties.

The hills that overhang the lakes appeared to me, in my young days
(and I have not seen them since), to be clothed with a short soft
verdure, of a hue so dark and vivid as I had never seen before.

In one of the lakes is a small island, rocky and wooded, which is
believed by the peasantry to represent the top of the highest tower of
the castle which sank, under a spell, to the bottom. In certain states
of the atmosphere, I have heard educated people say, when in a boat
you have reached a certain distance, the island appears to rise some
feet from the water, its rocks assume the appearance of masonry, and
the whole circuit presents very much the effect of the battlements of
a castle rising above the surface of the lake.

This was Miss Anne Baily's story of the submersion of this lost
castle:

_The Magician Earl_

It is well known that the great Earl of Desmond, though history
pretends to dispose of him differently, lives to this hour enchanted
in his castle, with all his household, at t