FOUND BY A RABBIT

Evening Star, Issue 22893, 26 February 1938, Page 8

FOUND BY A RABBIT

How often the novelist calls upon Chance to help him to make the fortune of his hero! Half the fun and excitement of adventure results from such happy accident. Much more stir-i ring is it, then, when sober fact quietly competes with;; romance and bears away the' palm. Was there ever a better example of the sort than that cited by Dr R. L. Graegar in his brilliant book, ‘ The Way I Went ’? The hero of the story is a young fellow named Pat Connolan, who, out and about with his dog at Burren, in Clare, not so long ago, saw a rabbit started by.his little animal companion. The rabbit scampered away and took refuge among some limestone rocks_. Peering down into the crevices among which it had vanished, Pat saw, not a rabbit, but something that shone. Drawing it out, he found the object to be a thin >curved ornament of yellow metal. He tdok it home, where, his uncle declaring it to be some brasswodk from an old coffin and unlucky to keep about the house, he took it out and threw it into a neighbouring bush. Two years passed, and then Justice Gleeson, out rabbit shooting, chanced to pass the house where Pat lived, and got into conversation with him about antiquities of one kind and another*

The forgotten ornament came back to Pat’s mind, and he grubbed about ia the bush till he found it. To his astonishment the magistrate discovered that the supposed brass coffin ornament was a superb collar or gold, a magnificent example of metal work 700 years older than Christianity. . „ _ .. Pat Connolan s “ coffin ornament" now has a place of honour in the National Museum in Dublin, the finest example of ancient metalwork -in that wonderful collections of, prehistoric gold.