36 LINKS WITH THE PAST [CH. 



music of Irish choirs. In later years Bresal longed 

 for a sight of his native land, though he loved his 

 home and ' every rock, tree, and flower " in his adopted 

 country. After returning to Ireland, his thoughts 

 reverted to Spain ; ' it appeared to him as though 

 he was once again in a granite nook among the rocks 

 beside the Priory ' ; he saw the ice-plant with its 

 little stars of white flowers sprinkled with red (the 

 London Pride) and a small evergreen tree from which 

 he had often gathered the orange-scarlet berries 

 (Arbutus). The Prior of the Spanish monastery ' with 

 heavenly vision saw Bresal gazing at the evergreen 

 tree and the ice-plaut, and turning to the trees 

 blessed them and commended them to go and make 

 real his dream. As Bresal brushed away his tears 

 he saw with amazement at his feet the ice-plant and 

 hard by the evergreen tree.' 



The plant represented in Fig. 2 is another 

 British species which tasks the ingenuity of students 

 of plant-geography. This is the Pipe Wort {Erio- 

 canlon sejjtaugulare), the sole representative in 

 Europe of a certain family of Monocotyledons : it 

 flourishes in the west of Ireland and in the western 

 islands of Scotland but nowhere else in Europe ; it is 

 native on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada 

 and the northern United States of America. Mr 

 Praeger in describing the striking mixture of species 

 in the west of Ireland writes, ' The pool from which 



