death, he was seen reaching towards a pow der barrel in order to end all in the explosion

-when some one, not so desperate as himself, forced him back, and beat a surrender. It is painful to have to report, that the President gave the ruthless order, that all found aliye in Dunboy should be put to death.*

After this sack of his strong hold, O'Sulli van, with his wife, children, retainers, and cattle, took shelter in the woods of Glengariff. Tyrrel and O'Connor Kerry held communication with him along the ridges of Slievelogher, Eugene M'Egan, the Apostolic Vicar, was in the centre of the M'Carthys of Carbery. But the Lord President was not to be withstood; and his Lieutenant, Sir Charles Wilmot, who was as good a guerilla as Tyrrel, and who knew the fastnesses

*The war in those disastrous days was carried on with peculiar animosity and rancour; religious hatred, party feuds, and national enmities combined to barb and poison the weapons of this warfare. That valiant Apostolic Vicar, Owen M'Egan, who was defeated and killed by Captain Taaffe near Bandon, in his zeal never pardoned an Irishman though a Papist, who fought for the Queen; but as soon as any such were taken, he had them confessed, absolved, and then hanged.

of Slievelogher and Desmond, as well as if he were the son of a Sullivan, surprised the O'Sullivans in Glengariff. The Prince of Bear and Bantry, amidst his own rocks, bogs, and woods, fought in the face of his wife, children and people ;-the battle was for the defence of the cattle, their only subsistence -their all. Through the whole Munster war, never was a field so desperately contested. From rock to rock, and ridge to ridge, the Irish suffered the assault of the English; and still the well-armed and fearless assailants carried one position after another, until the O'Sullivans gave way, and scattered over the hills, like sheep, leaving their herds a prey to the spoiler.

And now Tyrrel, finding the left of his position on Slievelogher turned by Wilmot -perceiving the game was up in Munster, and hopeless of farther Spanish aid, with the decision and despatch for which he was so notorious, retreated along the eastern parts of Kerry, through Limerick, Ormond, and Ely O'Carrol, until he reached in safety,

with all his partisans, his own country. O'Sullivan still clung with craving hope to his native rocks; but winter coming on, famine stared him and all belonging to him in the face-for Wilmot had wasted all Bear, Bantry, and the whole of Kerry—not a cow, garrane, goat, or sheep did he leave from Slieumiss to Glenflesk. O'Sullivan therefore consigning his wife and children to the care of his faithful gossip, Gorrane M'Swiney, determined to follow Tyrrel's example, and retreat to the confederates that still held out in Breffny and Ulster. He, therefore, trusting in God and the Catholic cause, set out in company with William Burke, O'Connor Kerry, and one hundred faithful and veteran Bonnaughts.

Gorrane, whose whole soul was in his charge, returned with them to a boolie he had set up under the foot of the Eagle's Precipice at Glengariff. This boolie or hut was so contrived that Wilmot and his Saxon devils, (as Gorrane called them,) might scour the mountain over and never see it, or sus▾

pect that there was in such a desert, a human habitation. It was erected against the face of a rocky ridge, the roof sloping down till it touched the moor, was covered with scraws and sods of heath, so that the place was undistinguishable from the shelving slope of the mountain, and the entrance a long, distant, and winding passage in the rock, and charcoal burned on the hearth for fire-it was secure from suspicion. But how was the princess of Bear and Bantry to be supported, not a cow was there to give milk, no corn, nor root, nor pulse. Gorrane had one salted salmon wrapped up in a cow's hide; that was all his provision when they entered the boolie, and where to go to seek for food, Gorrane knew not under heaven, famine had spread over the southern land— as Spencer says, "the people of Munster were brought to such wretchedness, that even a heart of stone would have rued to see the same; for out of every corner of the woods and glynnes they came creeping forth on their hands and knees, for their legs could

not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrion, happy were they when they could find them; yea and one another, sometime after; insomuch that the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves, and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrock, there they flocked as to a feast."

In this extremity of desolation was the south-west of Cork and Desmond, when Gorrane took home his charge to his boolie, and the poor fosterer knew not what to do-all his trust was that God was good, and the Virgin Mother, his protectress, would not fail him in his hour of need. And as thus one morning he was ruminating, he rambled under the precipice where year after year the eagles of the valley had nested and reared their young; and looking up, he saw one of these huge birds sailing on steady wing with a hare within its talons, and now it alighted on its rock-nest, and anon the young eagles were shrieking with triumph