slow, and it
was past two o'clock by the time he found himself leaning over its old
battlements, and looking up the river, over whose winding current and
wooded banks the soft moonlight was falling.

The cold breeze that blew lightly down the stream was grateful to him. It
cooled his throbbing head, and he drank it in at his hot lips. The scene,
too, had, without his being well sensible of it, a secret fascination.
The village was sunk in the profoundest slumber, not a mortal stirring,
not a sound afloat, a soft haze covered it all, and the fairy moonlight
hovered over the entire landscape.

In a state between rumination and rapture, Peter continued to lean over
the battlements of the old bridge, and as he did so he saw, or fancied he
saw, emerging one after another along the river bank in the little
gardens and enclosures in the rear of the street of Chapelizod, the
queerest little white-washed huts and cabins he had ever seen there
before. They had not been there that evening when he passed the bridge on
the way to his merry tryst. But the most remarkable thing about it was
the odd way in which these quaint little cabins showed themselves. First
he saw one or two of them just with the corner of his eye, and when he
looked full at them, strange to say, they faded away and disappeared.
Then another and another came in view, but all in the same coy way, just
appearing and gone again before he could well fix his gaze upon them; in
a little while, however, they began to bear a fuller gaze, and he found,
as it seemed to himself, that he was able by an effort of attention to
fix the vision for a longer and a longer time, and when they waxed faint
and nearly vanished, he had the power of recalling them into light and
substance, until at last their vacillating indistinctness became less and
less, and they assumed a permanent place in the moonlit landscape.

"Be the hokey," said Peter, lost in amazement, and dropping his pipe into
the river unconsciously, "them is the quarist bits iv mud cabins I ever
seen, growing up like musharoons in the dew of an evening, and poppin' up
here and down again there, and up again in another place, like so many
white rabbits in a warren; and there they stand at last as firm and fast
as if they were there from the Deluge; bedad it's enough to make a man
a'most believe in the fairies."

This latter was a large concession from Peter, who was a bit of a
free-thinker, and spoke contemptuously in h