t of my wits.'

So good old Sally, whose faith in such matters was a religion, went off
over the well-known ground in a gentle little amble--sometimes subsiding
into a walk as she approached some special horror, and pulling up
altogether--that is to say, suspending her knitting, and looking with a
mysterious nod at her young mistress in the four-poster, or lowering her
voice to a sort of whisper when the crisis came.

So she told her how when the neighbours hired the orchard that ran up to
the windows at the back of the house, the dogs they kept there used to
howl so wildly and wolfishly all night among the trees, and prowl under
the walls of the house so dejectedly, that they were fain to open the
door and let them in at last; and, indeed, small need was there for
dogs; for no one, young or old, dared go near the orchard after
night-fall. No, the burnished golden pippins that peeped through the
leaves in the western rays of evening, and made the mouths of the
Ballyfermot school-boys water, glowed undisturbed in the morning
sunbeams, and secure in the mysterious tutelage of the night smiled
coyly on their predatory longings. And this was no fanciful reserve and
avoidance. Mick Daly, when he had the orchard, used to sleep in the loft
over the kitchen; and he swore that within five or six weeks, while he
lodged there, he twice saw the same thing, and that was a lady in a hood
and a loose dress, her head drooping, and her finger on her lip, walking
in silence among the crooked stems, with a little child by the hand, who
ran smiling and skipping beside her. And the Widow Cresswell once met
them at night-fall, on the path through the orchard to the back-door,
and she did not know what it was until she saw the men looking at one
another as she told it.

'It's often she told it to me,' said old Sally; 'and how she came on
them all of a sudden at the turn of the path, just by the thick clump of
alder trees; and how she stopped, thinking it was some lady that had a
right to be there; and how they went by as swift as the shadow of a
cloud, though she only seemed to be walking slow enough, and the little
child pulling by her arm, this way and that way, and took no notice of
her, nor even raised her head, though she stopped and courtesied. And
old Dalton, don't you remember old Dalton, Miss Lily?'

'I think I do, the old man who limped, and wore the old black wig?'

'Yes, indeed, acushla, so he did. See how well she remembers!