confessing that she had imagined her
ministering angel to be Donal himself: now she had not even a
conjecture to throw at random after the person of her secret
servant. Donal, being a Celt, and a poet, would have been a brute
if he had failed of being a gentleman, and answered that he was
ashamed it should be another and not himself who had been her
servant and gained her commendation; but he feared, if he had made
any such attempt, he would but have fared like the husband in the
old ballad who insisted that his wife's work was much easier to do
than his own. But as he spoke, he saw a sudden change come over
Jean's countenance. Was it fear? or what was it? She gazed with
big eyes fixed on his face, heeding neither him nor his words, and
Donal, struck silent, gazed in return. At length, after a pause of
strange import, her soul seemed to return into her deep-set grey
eyes, and in a broken voice, low, and solemn, and fraught with
mystery, she said,

"Donal, it's the broonie!"

Donal's mouth opened wide at the word, but the tenor of his thought
it would have been hard for him to determine. Celtic in kindred and
education, he had listened in his time to a multitude of strange
tales, both indigenous and exotic, and, Celtic in blood, had been
inclined to believe every one of them for which he could find the
least _raison d'etre_. But at school he had been taught that such
stories deserved nothing better than mockery, that to believe them
was contrary to religion, and a mark of such weakness as involved
blame. Nevertheless, when he heard the word broonie issue from a
face with such an expression as Jean's then wore, his heart seemed
to give a gape in his bosom, and it rushed back upon his memory how
he had heard certain old people talk of the brownie that used, when
their mothers and grandmothers were young, to haunt the Mains of
Glashruach. His mother did not believe such things, but she
believed nothing but her New Testament!--and what if there should be
something in them? The idea of service rendered by the hand of a
being too clumsy, awkward, ugly, to consent to be seen by the more
finished race of his fellow-creatures, whom yet he surpassed in
strength and endurance and longevity, had at least in it for Donal
the attraction of a certain grotesque yet homely poetic element. He
remembered too the honour such a type of creature had had in being
lapt around for ever in the airy folds of L'Allegro. And to thin