Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Ghost."

The driver told his story like one saying his prayers, and he seemed to
have forgotten that he had a listener.

"And the ghost hasn't been seen again?" I said.

"No, not that I know of."

"I don't like your story," I said. "I like the story about Julia Cahill
better."

"Well, they're both true; one's as true as the other; and Julia and
Margaret are in America. Once a woman is wake she must go to America."

"It must have been a great shock to the priest."

"Faith it was, sir, to meet an unbaptised child on the roadside, and
the child the only bastard that was ever born in the parish,--so Tom
Mulhare says, and he's the oldest man in the county of Mayo."

"It was altogether a very queer idea, this playhouse."

"It was indeed, sir, a queer idea; but you see he's a queer man. He has
been always thinking of something to do good; and it is said that he
thinks too much. Father James is a very queer man, your honour."

At the end of a long silence, interrupted now and then by the
melancholy cry with which he encouraged his horse, he began another
story, how Father James MacTurnan had written to the Pope asking that
the priests might marry, "so afeard was he that the Catholics were
going to America and the country would become Protestant. And there's
James Murdoch's cabin, and he is the man that got the five pounds that
the bishop gave Father James to buy a pig." And when I asked him how he
knew all these things, he said, "There isn't many days in the year that
the old grey horse and myself don't do five-and-twenty miles, and I'm
often in and out of Rathowen."

"There is no doubt," I said to myself, "that this car-driver is the
legitimate descendant of the ancient bards."

CHAPTER VIII

THE WEDDING-GOWN

It was said, but with what truth I cannot say, that the Roche property
had been owned by the O'Dwyers many years ago, several generations
past, sometime in the eighteenth century. Only a faint legend of this
ownership remained; only once had young Mr. Roche heard of it, and it
was from his mother he had heard it; among the country people it was
forgotten. His mother had told him that his great-great-grandfather,
who had made large sums of money abroad, had increased his property by
purchase from the O'Dwyers, who then owned, as well as farmed, the
hillside on which the Big House stood. The O'Dwyers themselves had
forgotten that they were once much greater pe