o him by this sign, and he recoiled with a terrified prayer.
The lordly rider, with a look of pain and fury, struck at him
suddenly, with something that whistled in the air like a whip; and an
icy streak seemed to traverse his body as if he had been cut through
with a leaf of steel. But he was without scathe or scar, as he
afterwards found. At the same moment he saw the whole cavalcade break
into a gallop and disappear down the hill, with a momentary hurtling
in the air, like the flight of a volley of cannon shot.

Here had been the earl himself. He had tried one of his accustomed
stratagems to lead the smith to speak to him. For it is well known
that either for the purpose of abridging or of mitigating his period
of enchantment, he seeks to lead people to accost him. But what, in
the event of his succeeding, would befall the person whom he had thus
ensnared, no one knows.

_Moll Rial's Adventure_

When Miss Anne Baily was a child, Moll Rial was an old woman. She had
lived all her days with the Bailys of Lough Guir; in and about whose
house, as was the Irish custom of those days, were a troop of
bare-footed country girls, scullery maids, or laundresses, or employed
about the poultry yard, or running of errands.

Among these was Moll Rial, then a stout good-humoured lass, with
little to think of, and nothing to fret about. She was once washing
clothes by the process known universally in Munster as beetling. The
washer stands up to her ankles in water, in which she has immersed the
clothes, which she lays in that state on a great flat stone, and
smacks with lusty strokes of an instrument which bears a rude
resemblance to a cricket bat, only shorter, broader, and light enough
to be wielded freely with one hand. Thus, they smack the dripping
clothes, turning them over and over, sousing them in the water, and
replacing them on the same stone, to undergo a repetition of the
process, until they are thoroughly washed.

Moll Rial was plying her "beetle" at the margin of the lake, close
under the old house and castle. It was between eight and nine o'clock
on a fine summer morning, everything looked bright and beautiful.
Though quite alone, and though she could not see even the windows of
the house (hidden from her view by the irregular ascent and some
interposing bushes), her loneliness was not depressing.

Standing up from her work, she saw a gentleman walking slowly down the
slope toward her. He was a "grand-looking" g