muel and the Head Inquisitor of Spain. A smouldering saucer of
sulphur, purloined by the witch herself from the kennels
medicine-cupboard, gave a stimulating reality to the scene, even
though it had driven the fox terriers, who habitually acted as the
Witch's cats, to abandon their parts, and to hurry, sneezing and
coughing indignantly, to the kitchen. The twins, Jimmy and Georgy,
however, obligingly took their parts, and all was going according to
ritual, when one of the sudden and annoying attacks of rebellion to
which she was subject, came upon the Witch of Endor. The orthodox
conclusion involved a penitential march through the kitchen regions,
the Witch swathed in a sheet, and carrying lighted candles, while she
was ceremonially flagellated by the Prophet with one of his father's
hunting crops. This crowning moment was approaching, Christian had but
to reply suitably to the intimidating riddles of the hymn, and the
final act would open in all its solemnity. For, as has been said, the
spirit of revolt whispered to her, and ingeniously persuaded her that
the required recantation committed her to a falsehood.

As she told John, when the formal inquisition had passed through acrid
dispute to torture, she didn't tell lies.

CHAPTER II

In the days when Christian Talbot-Lowry was a little girl, that is to
say between the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century, the
class known as Landed Gentry was still pre-eminent in Ireland. Tenants
and tradesmen bowed down before them, with love sometimes, sometimes
with hatred, never with indifference. The newspapers of their
districts recorded their enterprises in marriage, in birth, in death,
copiously, and with a servile rapture of detail that, though it is not
yet entirely withheld from their survivors, is now bestowed with equal
unction on those who, in many instances, have taken their places,
geographically, if not their place, socially, in Irish every-day
existence. There is little doubt but that after the monsters of the
Primal Periods had been practically extinguished, a stray reptile,
here and there, escaped the general doom, and, as Mr. Yeats says of
his lug-worm, may have-sung with "its grey and muddy mouth" of how
"somewhere to North or West or South, there dwelt a gay, exulting,
gentle race" of Plesiosauridae, or Pterodactyli. Even thus may this
record be regarded; as partial, perhaps, but as founded on the facts
of a not wholly to be condemned past.