with her
subject, "maybe that thing was a pairson that's dead, an' might be owin'
a pound to another one, or has something that way on his soul, an' it's
in the want o' some one that'll ax it what's throublin' it. The like o'
thim couldn't spake till ye'll spake to thim first. But, sure, gerrls
has no courage--"

Barnet's smile was again one of wintry superiority.

"Willy Fennessy and Patsey Crimmeen was afther seein' it too last
night," went on Mrs. Griffen, "an' poor Willy was as much frightened! He
said surely 'twas a ghost. On the back avenue it was, an' one minute
'twas as big as an ass, an' another minute it'd be no bigger than a
bonnive--"

"Oh, the Lord save us!" wailed the kitchen-maid irrepressibly from the
scullery.

"I shall speak to Fennessy myself about this," said Mrs. Alexander,
making for the door with concentrated purpose, "and in the meantime I
wish to hear no more of this rubbish."

"I'm sure Fennessy wishes to hear no more of it," said Barnet acridly to
Mrs. Griffen, when Mrs. Alexander had passed swiftly out of hearing,
"after the way those girls have been worryin' on at him about it all the
morning. Such a set out!"

Mrs. Griffen groaned in a polite and general way, and behind Barnet's
back put her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and winked at the
kitchen-maid.

Mrs. Alexander found her conversation with Willy Fennessy less
satisfactory than usual. He could not give any definite account of what
he and Patsey had seen: maybe they'd seen nothing at all; maybe--as an
obvious impromptu--it was the calf of the Kerry cow; whatever was in it,
it was little he'd mind it, and, in easy dismissal of the subject, would
the misthress be against his building a bit of a coal-shed at the back
of the lodge while she was away?

That evening a new terror was added to the situation. Jimmy the
boot-boy, on his return from taking the letters to the evening post,
fled in panic into the kitchen, and having complied with the etiquette
invariable in such cases by having "a wakeness," he described to a
deeply sympathetic audience how he had seen something that was like a
woman in the avenue, and he had called to it and it returned him no
answer, and how he had then asked it three times in the name o' God what
was it, and it soaked away into the trees from him, and then there came
something rushing in on him and grunting at him to bite him, and he was
full sure it was the Fairy Pig from Lough Clure.

Day