"O, yes, Tom, I've seen those you mention, and a great many more, too; and if any of you have ever been to Dublin by the canal, I'm sure you must have seen the one at Clondalkin. There's one, too, you know, in the county Wicklow, at the lake that Tommy Moore made the beautiful song about:
'By that lake, whose gloomy shore
Skylark never warbled o'er.'"
"Why, now, yer honor's perfectially right!" said Jimmy, who just then remembered some incidents in his former travels to Dublin about his "little spot of a pratee garden, that was near being sowld at the Four Courts for non payment. Quite right your honor is. Sure I wint down to see where the blessed Saint Kevin done all his miracles—where he turned the loaves into stones, and where he med the owld king's goose, that he was so fond of, young again, and all that; but sure your honor knows all about it; but after a while, the man that was there showed me a little hole up over the lake in the clift above, and 'look!' says he, 'that's St. Kevin's bed,' says he. 'Why, then, now!' says I, 'up in that little pigeon-hole!' says I. 'O! and did his blessed reverince go up there to bed?' says I. 'No! you fool!' says he, 'but to avoid the darlin' young lady,' says he. 'And it's there he threw her down into the deep, cowld, dark lake,' says he. 'Would you like to go up and lie down in his bed?' says he. 'Is it me,' says I, 'to do it? Why my brain is like a spider's web wid lookin' at it,' says I. But a young man that was used to crawling in them unchristian places—them mines—went up; and I thought I could jump through a key-hole, I felt so, to see him do it; and says I, when he came down, 'Young man, I pray, when you settle in life, you may have a handier way of gettin' into bed than that, particularly if you're—'"
Here a burst of laughter, which it is not hard to elicit from such an auditory, interrupted Jimmy, who is requested to tell "whether he ever heard who built these round towers, or why they were built at all?"
"Why," remarks Jimmy, "why they were built, no one can tell—they don't look like any thing Christian; but the man that undoubtedly built some of them was the Gubbaun Seare."
"Who was he, Jimmy?" asked all.
"Why, then, your honor, myself doesn't know much about the Gubbaun Seare, only as the owld people tell us."
"Well, Jimmy, that don't make what the old people tell us of no account; for with all our new improvements, (I had been explaining a rail-road to them the evening before,) we are obliged to retain nearly all their inventions also; so you may as well tell us what you know about the Gubbaun Seare, for you may depend there must be some truth and value in it."
"Why, then, that's true for your honor," said another; a sentence, by the bye, which always greets you when you utter an opinion, correct or incorrect.
"Well, then," said Jimmy, "in them owld times, I believe, when the round towers was building, there was a mason—and if there was, he was as fine a mason as ever lived, or ever will again—and, indeed, your honor, you know the round towers would prove that, if he built them—for where is the mason-work that's equal to what's on them? That one at Glendalough is a fine one, to be sure—and there's many finer than that. Well, he lived in a fine cottage, somewhere in Munster, and I don't know exactly where.