ughnessy's, and offered to take his nephew and educate him
for a musician.

So Larry went to town, to live with his kind benefactor. He was well
clothed and cared for and being good and grateful, studied hard to be a
finished musician. He never forgot his humble home, or felt above his
poor relations. Every Sunday he walked out to see them, and good old
Dermot, who was fond and proud of him, you may depend. His cousin Katy
grew still dearer to him as the years wore on, and he blessed the time
when he was rich enough to take her to Dublin, and put her to school.
It was said she was to be governess--but every body thought Larry would
have no other wife but Katy--and every body was right.

Larry _has_ become a great musician--so great that even Mrs.
O'Shaughnessy admits that he "is not a bad fiddler."

From Dublin to Cork and Blarney Castle.

LITTLE NORAH AND THE BLARNEY STONE.

We left Dublin for Cork, on a fresh August morning--pleasant but
showery, like nearly all mornings in Ireland. The railway on which we
travelled, passes for the most part through a barren, boggy, desolate
country, with only here and there a tract of well cultivated land--past
low, miserable hovels of bog-working peasants, and wretched,
tumble-down little villages.

It was melancholy to see, all along our way, multitudes of
ruins--churches and castles and towers--battered, dismantled, and
ivy-grown--making it look more like a country of the dead than of the
living. In these crumbling remains, you read, almost as in a book, the
history of the ancient prosperity and power of Ireland, and of its
gradual destruction by wars, sieges, famine, and pestilence, till it
was brought to its present state of poverty and desolation.

We passed through, or in sight of, several famous old places, such as
Kildare, the Rock of Dunamase, Cashel, Kilmallock, and Buttevant.

Kildare, though now a small, dilapidated town, was once a large city,
renowned for its religious institutions. Its principal buildings were
churches, monasteries, and nunneries, and its chief productions
crucifixes, rosaries, and saints. The most celebrated among the
latter, was Saint Bridget, who received the veil from the hands of St
Patrick himself. She founded a nunnery here, which was most remarkable
for "the sacred fire," which the nuns who succeeded her kept burning
for hundreds of years--in remembrance of her, probably. From a little
story related of her, when she wa