were great cellars under the house, for it had been a
smuggler's house a hundred years before, and sometimes three loud raps
would come upon the drawing room window at sun-down, setting all the dogs
barking, some dead smuggler giving his accustomed signal. One night I
heard them very distinctly and my cousins often heard them, and later on
my sister. A pilot had told me that, after dreaming three times of a
treasure buried in my uncle's garden, he had climbed the wall in the
middle of the night and begun to dig but grew disheartened "because there
was so much earth." I told somebody what he had said and was told that it
was well he did not find it for it was guarded by a spirit that looked
like a flat iron. At Ballisodare there was a cleft among the rocks that I
passed with terror because I believed that a murderous monster lived
there that made a buzzing sound like a bee.

It was through the Middletons perhaps that I got my interest in country
stories and certainly the first faery stories that I heard were in the
cottages about their houses. The Middletons took the nearest for friends
and were always in and out of the cottages of pilots and of tenants. They
were practical, always doing something with their hands, making boats,
feeding chickens, and without ambition. One of them had designed a steamer
many years before my birth and long after I had grown to manhood one could
hear it--it had some sort of obsolete engine--many miles off wheezing in
the Channel like an asthmatic person. It had been built on the lake and
dragged through the town by many horses, stopping before the windows where
my mother was learning her lessons, and plunging the whole school into
candle-light for five days, and was still patched and repatched mainly
because it was believed to be a bringer of good luck. It had been called
after the betrothed of its builder "Janet," long corrupted into the more
familiar "Jennet," and the betrothed died in my youth having passed her
eightieth year and been her husband's plague because of the violence of
her temper. Another who was but a year or two older than myself used to
shock me by running after hens to know by their feel if they were on the
point of dropping an egg. They let their houses decay and the glass fall
from the windows of their greenhouses, but one among them at any rate had
the second sight. They were liked but had not the pride and reserve, the
sense of decorum and order, the instinctive playin