s about the country at markets and
fairs. The harder she was thinking about fickle Richard McBirney, the
louder and shriller she sang. A very few years of such wandering
shrivelled up her plump "pig-beauty," so that in her little sallow,
weather-beaten face her own mother would scarcely have recognised pretty
Isabella Reid. Then, after a long spell of illness in a Union
infirmary, she began to grow noticeably odder and stranger in her looks
and ways; until at length the children shouted "Mad Bell" as she passed,
and that became her recognised style and title.

Such, briefly, had been her experience of life, when one September
evening she came by chance to Big Anne and the Dummy's door. She had got
a very bad cold, and felt hardly able to drag herself along between the
berried hedges, and was so hoarse that she could with difficulty ask for
the night's lodging, which they granted without demur. Their times had
been unusually bad of late. In fact, their room was looking several
sizes larger than they were accustomed to see it, because they had sold
any articles of furniture for which "e'er a price at all" could be
obtained. But to whatever accommodation this bareness permitted they
made Mad Bell kindly welcome, the crathur being sick and crazy, and she
stayed with them for three or four days. By that time, finding herself
recovered, she resumed her journey, setting off early in the morning
with the abruptness and absence of circumlocution which, as a rule,
distinguished her proceedings. A friendly nod and grimace she made serve
for announcement of departure and leavetaking all in one. As her
hostesses watched her out of sight down the road, Big Anne said--

"Well, now, I never seen that quare little body in this counthry before,
and we're very apt to not set eyes on her agin. God be good to us all,
but the likes of her is to be pitied. She's worse off than the two of
us. But bedad, Winnie, if thim hins there don't prisintly take to layin'
a thrifle, it's in a tight houle we'll be ourselves. I dunno what's
bewitchin' them. And the sorra an ould stick have we left in it that man
or mortal 'ud give us the price of a pullet's egg for--and small blame
to him, unless he was as deminted as herself that's quittin'."

Mad Bell's tramp that day was all along a sequence of lonesome winding
lanes, where few dwellings were dotted among the green and gold of the
fields. The bustle of the harvest, its reaping and binding, was over in