erdone."

"O, you needn't be afeard," replied Barney; "he can overlook or not, as
he plaises; if he does not wish to do so, you're safe enough; but when
any one like him that has the power wishes to do it, they could wither
you by degrees off o' the airth."

"God be about us! But, Barney, you didn't tell us how it comes, for all
that."

"It comes from the fairies. Doesn't every one know that the fairies
themselves has the power of overlookin' both cattle and Christians?"

"That's true enough," she replied; "every one, indeed, knows that. Sure,
my aunt had a child that died o' the fairies."

"Yes, but Masther Harry can see them."

"What! is it the fairies?"

"Ay, the fairies, but only wid one eye, that piercin' black one of his.
No, no; as I said before, he may walk where he likes, both by night and
by day; he's safe from everything of the kind; even a ghost daren't lay
a finger on him; and as the devil and the fairies are connected, he's
safe from him, too, in this world at laste; but the Lord pity him when
he goes to the next; for there he'll suffer _lalty_."

The truth is, that in those days of witchcraft and apparitions of all
kinds, and even in the present, among the ignorant and uneducated of the
lower classes, any female seen at night in a lonely place, and supposed
to be a spirit, was termed a white woman, no matter what the color
of her dress may have been, provided it was not black. The same
superstition held good when anything in the shape of a man happened to
appear under similar circumstances. Terror, and the force of an excited
imagination, instantly transformed it into a black man, and that black
man, of course, was the devil himself. In the case before us, however,
our readers, we have no doubt, can give a better guess at the nature
of the black man and white woman in question than either the cook, the
housemaid, or even Barney himself.

It was late that night when Harry came in. The servants, with whose
terrors and superstitions Casey had taken such liberties, now looked
upon him as something awful, and, as might be naturally expected, felt a
dreadful curiosity with respect to him and his movements. They lay
awake on the night in question, with the express purpose of satisfying
themselves as to the hour of his return, and as that was between twelve
and one, they laid it down as a certain fact that there was something
"not light," and beyond the common in his remaining out so late.

CHAP