thing appeared. We kept awake as long
as we could, but at last our eyes grew very heavy, and the lady seemed
to feel more easy. So I snuffed out the candle. Out It hopped and kept a
jumping on one leg like from one side to the other. We were so much
afraid we covered our faces; we dreaded to see It, so we hid our eyes
under the sheet, and she clung on to me all shaking; she felt worse
because she was blind.

"We fell asleep at daylight, and when I told Monk, the butler, he said
it was a corpse, sure--a corpse whose legs had been tied to keep them
straight and the cords had not been taken off, the feet not being
loosened. Why my own dear mother, that's dead many a year (Heaven bless
her departed spirit!)--she would never tell a word that was not
true--she saw a ghost hopping in that way, tied-like, jumping around a
bed--blue as a blue bag; just after the third day she was buried, and my
mother (the Lord bless her soul!) told me the sons went to her grave and
loosened the cords and she never came back any more. Isn't it awful?
And, bedad, Miss, it's every word true. I can tell you of a young man I
knew who looked into a window at midnight (after he had been playing
cards, Miss, gambling with the other boys) and saw something awful
strange, and was turned by ghosts into a <i>shadow</i>."

This seemed to be a thrilling theme, such as Hawthorne would have been
able to weave into the weirdest of weird tales, and I said, "Go on."

"Well, he used to go playing cards about three miles from his home with
a lot of young men, for his mother wouldn't have cards played in her
house, and she thought it was wicked, and begged him not to play. It's a
habit with the young men of Ireland--don't know as it's the same in
other countries--and they play for a goose or a chicken. They go to some
vacant house to get away from their fathers, they're so against it at
home. Why, my brother-in-law used to go often to such a house on the
side of a country road. Each man would in turn provide the candles to
play by, and as this house was said to be haunted, bedad they had it
all to themselves. Well, this last night that ever they played there--it
was Tom's own brother that told me this--just as they were going to deal
the cards, a tall gentleman came out from a room that had been the
kitchen. He walked right up to them--he was dressed in black cloth
clothes, and wore a high black hat--and came right between two of the
men and told them to deal out