About a month ago Caspar Ardmore, the young man, met me at a church affair.

Just as the young couple reached him, Ardmore raised his hat, at the same time stepping forward so that he blocked Belle's progress.

"Mr. Ardmore, will you do me the very great favor of ceasing your attempts at acquaintance?" "Acquaintance?

"And what have you to say about this?" demanded Ardmore sneeringly.

Ardmore was on his feet in an instant.

" "Oh, that's the midshipman, is it?" demanded Ardmore in a sneering voice.

Then Ardmore went out of town for three days.

Ardmore is the one responsible for the trouble.

" As he read, and realized how flat his charge had fallen, Ardmore's face passed through several shades of red.

"If thou hast the right, O Erin, to a champion of battle to aid thee thou hast the head of a hundred thousand, Declan of Ardmore." (Martyrology of Oengus).

Maps and admiralty charts call it Ram Head, but the real name is Ceann-a-Rama and popularly it is often styled Ardmore Head.

Nestling at the north side of the headland and sheltered by the latter from Atlantic storms stands one of the most remarkable groups of ancient ecclesiastical remains in Irelandall that has survived of St. Declan's holy city of Ardmore.

Declan's "pattern" at Ardmore continues to be still the most noted celebration of its kind in Ireland.

Even to the present day Declan's name is borne as their praenomen by hundreds of Waterford men, and, before introduction of the modern practice of christening with foolish foreign names, its use was far more common, as the ancient baptismal registers of Ardmore, Old Parish, and Clashmore attest.

The monuments proper of Declan remaining at Ardmore are (a) his oratory near the Cathedral and Round Tower in the graveyard, (b) his stone on the beach, (c) his well on the cliff, and (d) another stone said to have been found in his tomb and preserved at Ardmore for long ages with great reveration.

The monuments proper of Declan remaining at Ardmore are (a) his oratory near the Cathedral and Round Tower in the graveyard, (b) his stone on the beach, (c) his well on the cliff, and (d) another stone said to have been found in his tomb and preserved at Ardmore for long ages with great reveration.

"St. Declan's Stone" is a glacial boulder of very hard conglomerate which lies on a rocky ledge of beach beneath the village of Ardmore.

Far the most striking of all the monuments at Ardmore is, of course, the Round Tower which, in an excellent state of preservation, stands with its conical cap of stone nearly a hundred feet high.

St. Declan's foundation at Ardmore seems (teste Moran's Archdall) to have been one of the Irish religious houses which accepted the reform of Pope Innocent at the Lateran Council and to have transformed itself into a Regular Canonry.

Moelettrim O Duibhe-rathre who died in 1303 after he had, according to the annals of Inisfallen, "erected and finished the Church" of Ardmore.

The "Wars of the Gaedhil and Gall" have reference, circa 824 or 825, to plunder by the Northmen of Disert Tipraite which is almost certainly the church of Dysert by the Holy Well at Ardmore.

Ardmore | | ~/--/~'~ |

The stone in question remains still in Declan's graveyard in his own town of Ardmore-Declain, where it stands on an elevated place in memory of this miracle.

Among the company were found St. Senanus of Limerick, St. Declan of Ardmore, St. Canice of Kilkenny, St. Finbar of Cork, St. Michan of Dublin, St. Brandon of Kerry, St. Fachnan of Ross, and others of that holy brotherhood; a vacant place, which completed the four-and-twentieth, was left for St. Colman, who, as every body knows, is of Cloyne; and he, having taken his seat, addressed the president, to inform him that he had brought the man.

He's just been taken into the office of Haynes and Ardmore, consulting mining engineers, and everybody says that'll mean a partnership some day.