Some allusion having been made to Borris, the lawyer said to me, "You will see at Borris the best and ablest Irishman alive." On this the priest testily and tartly broke in, "Do you mean the man without hands or feet ?" "I mean," replied the lawyer, very quietly, "the man in whom all that has gone in you or me to arms and legs has gone to heart and head!" Borris House stands high in the heart of an extensive and nobly wooded park, and commands one of the finest landscapes I have seen in Ireland.
As we stood and gazed upon it from the hall door, the distant hills were touched with a soft purple light such as transfigures the Apennines at sunset.
"You should see this view in June," said Mrs, Kavanagh, "we are all brown and bare now." Brown and bare, like most other terms, are relative.

To the eye of an American this whole region now seems a sea of verdure, less clear and fresh, I can easily suppose, than it may be in the early summer, but verdure still.

And one must get into the Adirondacks, or up among the mountains of Western Virginia, to find on our Atlantic slope such trees as I have this evening seen.

One grand ilex near the house could hardly be matched in the Villa d'Este.
The house is stately and commodious, and more ancient than it appears to be,--so many additions have been made to it at different times.

It has passed through more than one siege, and in the '98 Mr.Kavanagh tells me the townspeople of Borris came up here and sought refuge.