who live in our present and more enlightened
days; as our readers will admit when they are told that the period of
our narrative is in the reign of that truly religious monarch, Charles
the Second, who, conscious of his inward and invisible grace, was known
to exhaust himself so liberally of his virtue, when touching for the
Evil, that there was very little of it left to regulate that of his own
private life. In those days Ireland was a mass of social superstitions,
and a vast number of cures in a variety of diseases were said to be
performed by witches, wizards, fairy-men, fairy-women, and a thousand
other impostors, who, supported by the gross ignorance of the people,
carried that which was first commenced in fraud and cunning into a
self-delusion, which, in process of time, led them to become dupes to
their own impostures. It is not to be wondered at, then, that Alice
Goodwin, a young creature of a warm imagination and extraordinary
constitutional timidity, should feel the full force of the superstitions
which swarmed around her, and impregnated her fancy so strongly that
it teemed with an unhealthy creation, which frequently rendered her
existence painful by a morbid apprehension of wicked and supernatural
influences. In other respects she was artlessness itself, could never
understand what falsehood meant, and, as to truth, her unspotted
mind was transparent as a sunbeam. Our readers are not to understand,
however, that though apparently flexible and ductile, she possessed
no power of moral resistance. So very far from that, her disposition,
wherever she thought herself right, was not only firm and unbending,
but sometimes rose almost to obstinacy. This, however, never appeared,
unless she considered herself as standing upon the basis of truth. In
cases where her judgment was at fault, or when she could not see her
way, she was a perfect child, and, like a child, should be taken by the
hand and supported. It was, however, when mingling in society that her
timidity and bashfulness were most observable; these, however, were
accompanied with so much natural grace, and unaffected innocence of
manner, that the general charm of her whole character was fascinating
and irresistible; nay, her very weaknesses created an atmosphere of love
and sympathy around her that nobody could breathe without feeling her
influence. Her fear of ghosts and fairies, her dread of wizards and
witches, of wise women and strolling conjurers, with