entleman, arrayed in a
flowered silk dressing-gown, with a cap of velvet on his head; and as
he stepped toward her, in his slippered feet, he showed a very
handsome leg. He was smiling graciously as he approached, and drawing
a ring from his finger with an air of gracious meaning, which seemed
to imply that he wished to make her a present, he raised it in his
fingers with a pleased look, and placed it on the flat stones beside
the clothes she had been beetling so industriously.

He drew back a little, and continued to look at her with an
encouraging smile, which seemed to say: "You have earned your reward;
you must not be afraid to take it."

The girl fancied that this was some gentleman who had arrived, as
often happened in those hospitable and haphazard times, late and
unexpectedly the night before, and who was now taking a little
indolent ramble before breakfast.

Moll Rial was a little shy, and more so at having been discovered by
so grand a gentleman with her petticoats gathered a little high about
her bare shins. She looked down, therefore, upon the water at her
feet, and then she saw a ripple of blood, and then another, ring after
ring, coming and going to and from her feet. She cried out the sacred
name in horror, and, lifting her eyes, the courtly gentleman was gone,
but the blood-rings about her feet spread with the speed of light over
the surface of the lake, which for a moment glowed like one vast
estuary of blood.

Here was the earl once again, and Moll Rial declared that if it had
not been for that frightful transformation of the water she would have
spoken to him next minute, and would thus have passed under a spell,
perhaps as direful as his own.

_The Banshee_

So old a Munster family as the Bailys, of Lough Guir, could not fail
to have their attendant banshee. Everyone attached to the family knew
this well, and could cite evidences of that unearthly distinction. I
heard Miss Baily relate the only experience she had personally had of
that wild spiritual sympathy.

She said that, being then young, she and Miss Susan undertook a long
attendance upon the sick bed of their sister, Miss Kitty, whom I have
heard remembered among her contemporaries as the merriest and most
entertaining of human beings. This light-hearted young lady was dying
of consumption. The sad duties of such attendance being divided among
many sisters, as there then were, the night watches devolved upon the
two ladies I have n