ong rows of casements staring down blankly on her, she saw only
the one mole's-eye window of a tiny whitewashed cabin peering at her
from beneath its thatched eaves, and all about it the great lonely bog
spreading away with never a trace of any town.

"Och, wirrasthrew, man, what are you after doin' on me?" she said,
beginning to bewail herself querulously. "Sure you haven't brought me to
any place at all. Every hour of the black night it'ill be afore ever
I'll get there now, and the Union'ill be shut, and what's to become of
me then I dunno. You'd a right to ha' tould me----"

"Blathers!" said her nephew, "git down out of that wid your yawpin'.
D'you want the folk here to think you're a sackful of ould hins? And go
in and be seein' after a bit of fire; it's late enough to be sure. What
fool's talk have you about the Union, and bad luck to it? You'll find
the things for the supper in the inside of the ould churn. Union,
moyah!"

And old Moggy, alighting with cramped limbs, entered her home at
Lisconnel, feeling blissfully as if she had been _unpacked_ out of a
most horrible nightmare.

Ody was probably actuated by several unassorted motives in dealing thus
with his superfluous old great-aunt. Pride and pity and perversity and
generosity--all had, no doubt, some influence upon his conduct, while
long use and wont had unawares given her the same sort of hold upon his
affections that was possessed in a much higher degree by Rory, the pony,
whose humours were of course easier to put up with than human foibles.
But the old woman measured his magnanimity by the immensity of the
benefit which it had conferred upon her, and with a strong revulsion of
feeling she formed an opinion of his virtues and talents as exalted
quite as that which she had often secretly jibed at in his father.
Accordingly she sang his praises unweariedly among their new neighbours,
and, as Ody was vain enough not to dislike the echoes which reached him,
he soon began to look upon her with more complacency, so that they
agreed much better than heretofore. She found no small solace, too,
after her long cronyless isolation up at the Three Mile Farm, in the
company of Mrs. Joyce, and Mrs. Keogh, and the other Lisconnel dames. In
short, a kind of Indian summer of content seemed to be setting in for
her. Moggy's mind, however, was of the self-tormenting type, and soon
devised means of marring it. They took the form of apprehensions that
Ody would presently