h the heather, I
opened my wallet; pulled forth a sausage, a crust, and a skin of wine;
supped; and stretched myself to sleep through the short summer night.

"The howly Mother presarve us! Whist now, Daniel Cullinan, did ye'ver
hear the like of it?"

I am glad to remember now that, even as the voice fell on my ear and awoke
me, I had presence enough of mind to roll quickly off my bed of heath away
from the road and towards the shelter of a laurestinus bush a few paces
from my elbow. But between me and the shrub lay a fern-masked hollow
between two boulders, into which I fell with a shock, and so lay staring
up at the heavens.

The wasted moon hung directly overhead in a sky already paling with dawn.
And while I stared up at her, taking stock of my senses and wondering if
here--here in Corsica--I had really heard that inappropriate sound, soon
across the hillside on my left echoed an even stranger one--yet one I
recognised at once as having mingled with my dreams; a woman's voice
pitched at first in a long monotonous wail and then undulating in
semitones above and below the keynote--a voice which seemed to call from
miles away--a sound as dismal as ever fell on a man's ears.

"Arrah, let me go, Corp'ril! let me go, I tell yez! 'Tis the _banshee_--
who knows it better than I?--that heard the very spit of it the day my
brother Mick was drowned in Waterford harbour, and me at Ballyroan that
time in Queen's County, and a long twenty-five miles away as ever the crow
flies!"

"Ah, hold your whist, my son! Mebbee 'tis but some bird of the country--
bad end to it!--or belike the man we're after, that has spied us, and is
putting a game on us."

"Bird!" exclaimed the man he had called Daniel Cullinan, as again the wail
rang down from the hills. "Catch the bird can talk like yondhar, and I
give ye lave to eat him and me off the same dish. And if 'tis a man, and
he's anywhere but on the road, here's a rare bottle of hay we'll search
through for him. Rest aisy now, Corp'ril, and give it up. That man with
the mules, we'll say, was a liar; and turn back before the worse befalls
us!"

Through my ferny screen I saw them--two redcoats in British uniform
disputing on the road not ten paces from my shelter. They moved on some
fifty yards, still disputing, the first sunrays glinting on the barrels of
the rifles they shouldered: and almost as soon as their backs were turned
I broke cover and crept away into the _macchia_