It was a bright, warm September morning (one of those days so rare in a climate impregnated with the vapours of the greatest ocean of the earth), that, for the first time since his arrival in the country, General Fitzwalter entered the village of Ballydab. But neither the noon-day sun which shone on its views, nor the mountain breeze that blew over them, rich in the perfumes of plants peculiar to the southern mountains of / Ireland, could lend a charm to this ruinous retreat of indigence and misery. Ballydab, the El Dorado of O'Leary; the once fair dependency of its own feudal castle, an ancient borough, which had formerly sent two members to parliament by prescriptive right (for its charter was not upon record), Ballydab, once noted in military and ecclesiastical history, was now a desolate and ruinous village, scarcely less imposing or less miserable in its appearance than the deserted city of Kilmallock in the same province(4). The remains of a wall which once surrounded the town were still visible. The site of a Dominican abbey of Black Friars, erected in the fifteenth century, by ‘the sovereign, brethren, and commonalty,’ was yet ascertainable; and the ruins of other castles and monasteries afforded shelter to many wretched families, who had built their perishable / huts against the walls of edifices, whose strength had stood the shock of ages. Ballydab, which had been founded by the Macarthies, had long since been transferred to the Dunore family, and had been included in the great sale of boroughs, which, while it sanctified the principle of corruption, by acknowledging the landlord's pecuniary interest in the votes of his tenantry, and his possession of the borough, had purchased the transfer of all right in the annihilation of the national legislature. Desolate, impoverished, and neglected, the surrounding land given up to jobbers, it bore all the signs, not only of distress, but of squalid and hopeless pauperism.