rtgaged to the doors and that the mortgages would be
foreclosed at my grandfather's death. They kept nothing from me, and my
grandmother has said to me with a watery smile: "If I survive your
grandfather, Bawn, my dear, you and I will have to find genteel lodgings
in Dublin. It would be a strange thing for a Lady St. Leger to come down
from Aghadoe Abbey to that. To be sure there was once a Countess went
ballad-singing in the streets of Cork."

"That day is far away," I answered. "And when it comes there will be no
genteel lodgings, but Theobald and I will take care of you somewhere.
In a little house it may be, but one with a garden where you can walk in
the sun in winter mornings as you do now, and prod at the weeds in the
path as you do now with your silver-headed cane."

"If I could survive your grandfather," she said, turning away her head,
"my heart would break to leave Aghadoe. I ask nothing of you and
Theobald, Bawn, but that you should take care of each other when we are
gone. It is not right that the old should burden the young."

I have always known, or at least since I was capable of entertaining
such things, that our grandparents destined Theobald and me for each
other. I have no love for Theobald such as I find in my books, but I
have a great affection for him as the dearest of brothers.

I have not said before that he is a soldier. What else should he be but
a soldier? Since there have always been soldiers in the family, and my
grandfather could not have borne him to be anything else.

Dear Theobald, how brave and simple and kind he was!

I have said nothing about the ghosts of Aghadoe Abbey, but it has many
ghosts, or it had.

First and foremost there is the Lord St. Leger, who was killed in a
Dublin street brawl a hundred years ago, who will come driving home at
midnight headless in his coach, and the coachman driving him also
headless, carrying his head under his arm. That is not a very pleasant
thing to see enter as the gates swing open of themselves to let the
ghost through.

Then there is the ghost of the woman who cries outside in the shrubbery.
I have seen her myself in a glint of the moonlight, her black hair
covering her face as she bends to the earth, incessantly seeking
something among the dead leaves, which she cannot discover, and for
which she cries.

And again, there is the lady who goes down the stairs, down, down,
through the underground passage, and yet lower to the well that