py husband? No,
no! Can ye fancy the merry laugh o' childer in this house, or a babe
on the father's knee, or the happy, still smile on the mother's winsome
face, some few years hence? No, Madge! the devil has set his black claw
on the man's brow."

"Hush, hush, Goody Darkmans; he may hear o' ye!" said the second gossip,
who, having now done all that remained to do, had seated herself down by
the window, while the more ominous crone, leaning over Aram's oak chair,
uttered from thence her sibyl bodings.

"No," replied Mother Darkmans, "I seed him go out an hour agone, when
the sun was just on the rise; and I said, when I seed him stroam into
the wood yonder, and the ould leaves splashed in the damp under his
feet, and his hat was aboon his brows, and his lips went so,--I said,
says I, 't is not the man that will make a hearth bright that would walk
thus on his marriage day. But I knows what I knows, and I minds what I
seed last night."

"Why, what did you see last night?" asked the listener, with a trembling
voice; for Plother Darkmans was a great teller of ghost and witch tales,
and a certain ineffable awe of her dark gypsy features and malignant
words had circulated pretty largely throughout the village.

"Why, I sat up here with the ould deaf woman, and we were a drinking the
health of the man and his wife that is to be, and it was nigh twelve
o' the clock ere I minded it was time to go home. Well, so I puts on
my cloak, and the moon was up, an' I goes along by the wood, and up by
Fairlegh Field, an' I was singing the ballad on Joe Wrench's hanging,
for the spirats had made me gamesome, when I sees somemut dark creep,
creep, but iver so fast, arter me over the field, and making right ahead
to the village. And I stands still, an' I was not a bit afeared; but
sure I thought it was no living cretur, at the first sight. And so it
comes up faster and faster, and then I sees it was not one thing, but a
many, many things, and they darkened the whole field afore me. And what
d' ye think they was? A whole body o' gray rats, thousands and thousands
on 'em; and they were making away from the outbuildings here. For sure
they knew, the witch things, that an ill luck sat on the spot. And so I
stood aside by the tree, an' I laughed to look on the ugsome creturs as
they swept close by me, tramp, tramp! and they never heeded me a jot;
but some on 'em looked aslant at me with their glittering eyes, and
showed their white teeth, as