been mighty comfortable; but as it was, what he got wouldn't have kept
him in shoe-leather, but for making both ends meet by wearing his
shoes in his pocket, except when he was in the town, and obliged to
look genteel for the credit of the place he came from.

Well, all was going on as peaceable as could be, till one market-day,
when business (or it may have been pleasure) detained him till the
heel of the evening, and by nightfall, when he began to make the road
short in good earnest, he was so flustered, rehearsing his messages to
make sure he'd forgotten nothing, that he never bethought him to leave
off his brogues, but tramped on just as if shoe-leather were made to
be knocked to bits on the king's highway.

And this was what he was after saying:

"A dozen hanks of grey yarn for Mistress Murphy."

"Three gross of bright buttons for the tailor."

"Half an ounce of throat drops for Father Andrew, and an ounce of
snuff for his housekeeper," and so on.

For these were what he went to the town to fetch, and he was afraid
lest one of the lot might have slipped his memory.

Now everybody knows there are two ways home from the town; and that's
not meaning the right way and the wrong way, which my grandmother
(rest her soul!) said there was to every place but one that it's not
genteel to name. (There could only be a wrong way _there_, she said.)
The two ways home from the town were the highway, and the way by
Murdoch's Rath.

Murdoch's Rath was a pleasant enough spot in the daytime, but not
many persons cared to go by it when the sun was down. And in all the
years Pat was going backwards and forwards, he never once came home
except by the high-road till this unlucky evening, when, just at the
place where the two roads part, he got, as one may say, into a sort of
confusion.

"Halt!" says he to himself (for his own uncle had been a soldier, and
Pat knew the word of command). "The left-hand turn is the right one,"
says he, and he was going down the high-road as straight as he could
go, when suddenly he bethought himself. "And what am I doing?" he
says. "This was my left hand going to town, and how in the name of
fortune could it be my left going back, considering that I've turned
round? It's well that I looked into it in time." And with that he went
off as fast down the other road as he started down this.

But how far he walked he never could tell, before all of a sudden the
moon shone out as bright as day, and Pat