because its black had become streaked with white in such a fashion
that its apparent hue varied according to what came uppermost in
accidents of ruffling and smoothing. A neighbour once said of him that
he was the living moral of a little ould lepreehawn that they were after
making a couple of sizes too big by mistake; and my own impression is
that further opportunities for observing specimens of the race would be
likely to bear out this statement.

The summer evening on which he was first seen at Lisconnel had followed
a very fine day. In the heart of its golden afternoon Mrs. O'Driscoll
trusted her youngest son Terence out on the bog with his brothers and
sisters and some other children, the eldest of whom, Johanna Harvey, the
Ryans' orphan niece, was credited with wit enough to keep the party out
of the holes. They wandered off rather more widely than usual, along the
foot of the hill, lured on by a sprinkling of dainty white mushrooms,
which they found, generally with yells, studded here and there. At last
they sat down on a bank to peel their delicate, pink-quilted buttons,
all of them except Terence, who was not yet of an age to have acquired a
taste for mushrooms. He had been carried most of the way, still he had
toddled further than he was accustomed to do, and his unwonted exertions
led him to curl himself up behind a sun-smitten rock and fall asleep
with a quietness which presently brought upon him the fate of out of
sight out of mind. After a while, however, Johanna did bethink herself
of him, and was just on the point of wondering aloud where little
Terence had gone to, when her cousin Thady turned her thoughts into a
different channel by suddenly saying, "What was there in it before the
beginnin' of everythin'?"

Thady was a small, anxious-looking child, whose pale and peaky face his
mother often likened regretfully to a hap'orth of soap after a week's
washing. He had spent a surprisingly considerable part of his six years
in metaphysical speculations, and was always disposed to make a personal
grievance of the difficulties in which they constantly landed him. His
tone was now rather peremptory as he repeated, "What was there in it
before the beginnin' of everythin'?"

"Sure, nothin' at all," said his elder brother Peter, to whom the answer
seemed quite simple and satisfactory. But Johanna looked as if she had
caught sight of some distant object which provoked hard staring.

"Then what was there before