It was just the old story. He tired of her,
and he wanted to push himself in the
world; and he married a girl of the
Collopys, that had a great fortune—twenty-
four cows, seventy sheep, and a hundred
and twenty goats.

He married this Mary Collopy, and grew
richer than before; and Ellen Coleman died
broken-hearted. But that did not trouble
the strong farmer much.

He would have liked to have children,
but he had none, and this was the only
cross he had to bear, for everything else
went much as he wished.

One night he was returning from the
fair of Nenagh. A shallow stream at that
time crossed the road—they have thrown a
bridge over it, I am told, some time since—
and its channel was often dry in summer
weather. When it was so, as it passes
close by the old farm-house of Drumgunniol,
without a great deal of winding, it
makes a sort of road, which people then
used as a short cut to reach the house by.
Into this dry channel, as there was plenty
of light from the moon, my grand-uncle
turned his horse, and when he had reached
the two ash-trees at the meering of the
farm he turned his horse short into the
river-field, intending to ride through the
gap at the other end, under the oak-tree,
and so he would have been within a few
hundred yards of his door.

As he approached the "gap" he saw, or
thought he saw, with a slow motion, gliding
along the ground toward the same point,
and now and then with a soft bound, a
white object, which he described as being
no bigger than his hat, but what it was he
could not see, as it moved along the hedge
and disappeared at the point to which he
was himself tending.

When he reached the gap the horse
stopped short. He urged and coaxed it in
vain. He got down to lead it through,
but it recoiled, snorted, and fell into a wild
trembling fit He mounted it again. But
its terror continued, and it obstinately
resisted his caresses and his whip. It was
bright moonlight, and my grand-uncle was
chafed by the horse's resistance, and, seeing
nothing to account for it, and being so
near home, what little patience he
possessed forsook him, and, plying his whip
and spur in earnest, he broke into oaths
and curses.

All on a sudden the horse sprang through,
and Con Donovan, as he passed under the
broad branch of the oak, saw clearly a
woman standing on the bank beside him,
her arm extended, with the hand of which,
as he flew by, she struck him a blow upon
the shoulders. It threw him forward upon
the neck of the horse, which, in wild terror,
reached the door at a gallop, and stood
there quivering and steaming all over.

Less alive than dead, my grand-uncle
got in. He told his story, at least, so
much as he chose. His wife did not quite
know what to think. But that something
very bad had happened she could not doubt.
He was very faint and ill, and begged that
the priest should be sent for forthwith.
When they were getting him to his bed
they saw distinctly the marks of five finger-
points on the flesh of his shoulder, where
the spectral blow had fallen. These singular
marks—which they said resembled in
tint the hue of a body struck by lightning—
remained imprinted on his flesh, and were
buried with him.

When he had recovered sufficiently to
talk with the people about him—speaking,
like a man at his last hour, from a
burdened heart and troubled conscience—
he repeated his story, but said he did not
see, or, at all events, know, the face of
the figure that stood in the gap. No one
believed him. He told more about it to
the priest than to others. He certainly
had a secret to tell. He might as well
have divulged it frankly, for the neighbours
all knew well enough that it was
the face of dead Ellen Coleman that he had
seen.

From that moment my grand-uncle never
raised his head. He was a scared, silent,
broken-spirited man. It was early summer
then, and at the fall of the leaf in the same
year he died.

Of course there was a wake, such as
beseemed a strong farmer so rich as he. For
some reason the arrangements of this
ceremonial were a little different from the usual
routine.

The usual practice is to place the body
in the great room, or kitchen, as it is called,
of the house. In this particular case there
was, as I told you, for some reason, an
unusual arrangement. The body was placed
in a small room that opened upon the greater
one. The door of this, during the wake,
stood open. There were candles about the
bed, and pipes and tobacco on the table, and
stools for such guests as chose to enter,
the door standing open for their reception.
The body, having been laid out, was left
alone, in this smaller room, during the
preparations for the wake. After nightfall
one of the women, approaching the bed to