o the Continent for a
holiday." He himself had once been led into temptation and was going home
with a woman, but having touched his scapular by chance, saw in a moment
an angel waving white wings in the air. Presently I was to meet him no
more and my uncle said he had done something disgraceful about a horse.

XX

I was climbing up a hill at Howth when I heard wheels behind me and a
pony-carriage drew up beside me. A pretty girl was driving alone and
without a hat. She told me her name and said we had friends in common and
asked me to ride beside her. After that I saw a great deal of her and was
soon in love. I did not tell her I was in love, however, because she was
engaged. She had chosen me for her confidant and I learned all about her
quarrels with her lover. Several times he broke the engagement off, and
she would fall ill, and friends would make peace. Sometimes she would
write to him three times a day, but she could not do without a confidant.
She was a wild creature, a fine mimic and given to bursts of religion. I
have known her to weep at a sermon, call herself a sinful woman, and mimic
it after. I wrote her some bad poems and had more than one sleepless night
through anger with her betrothed.

XXI

At Ballisodare an event happened that brought me back to the superstitions
of my childhood. I do not know when it was, for the events of this period
have as little sequence as those of childhood. I was staying with cousins
at Avena house, a young man a few years older and a girl of my own age and
perhaps her sister who was a good deal older. My girl cousin had often
told me of strange sights she had seen at Ballisodare or Rosses. An old
woman three or four feet in height and leaning on a stick had once come to
the window and looked in at her, and sometimes she would meet people on
the road who would say "how is so-and-so," naming some member of her
family, and she would know, though she could not explain how, that they
were not people of this world. Once she had lost her way in a familiar
field, and when she found it again the silver mounting on a walking-stick
belonging to her brother which she carried had vanished. An old woman in
the village said afterwards "you have good friends amongst them, and the
silver was taken instead of you."

Though it was all years ago, what I am going to tell now must be accurate,
for no great while ago she wrote out her unprompted memory of it all and
it was the same as min