Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/537

Rh Mrs. Stamer, of Stamer Park and Carnelly, heard from her husband's aunts, granddaughters of WiUiam Stamer, that the latter and his brother Henry Stamer of Lattoon, with a few soldiers, swooped down on Quin Abbey, surprising the monks and the people at vespers. The laity fled, but the priest continued the service till Henry Stamer dragged him away. The old man clung to the altar for a moment, praying that Henry might have no family and that William's name might die out in three generations of one male each. The Stamers then expelled the monks and burned the Abbey. The prophecy was not made ^.v post facto, as Mrs. Stamer assured me, but her only son predeceased her husband, who was William's grandson. The monks survived at Drim, in the neighbourhood of the Abbey, until 1S28, when the last. Father John Hogan, died. I knew two persons who remembered him ; he was buried in the cloister, where a long epitaph records his life, ending with the pathetic text, "Qui seminat in lachrymis exultatiofie metet."

There was a tradition in the Ross Lewin family of Fortfergus and Ross Hill that the French landed at the former place, took all the butter out of the dairy, wrapped it in sheets, and burnt it and other things on the lawn. This agrees with an early deed of Du Guai Trouin, who, when a mere lad of twenty in 1692, entered the Shannon, sacked a chateau in Clare, and did not retire until a detachment of the Limerick garrison was sent against him.

In 1839 it was told in Querin that, after King W'illiam had prevailed, MacMahon, one of Lord Clare's kerns, used to make plundering excursions to harry the English settlers. After many years spent thus, he robbed a retired soldier named John Meade, who gathered his neighbours and tracked the plunderers to a house in the woods. The pursuers tore off the thatch and leaped in, and a fierce fight ensued in the narrow interior. Meade was engaged with one of the bandits when MacMahon stabbed him in the side with a long spear, and he fell. The wounded man, however, in