heels wherever she went; and although she
could not see it, she could hear it spring
on the back of her chair when she sat
down, and growl in her ear, so that she
would bounce up with a scream and a
prayer, fancying that it was on the point of
taking her by the throat.

And the priest's boy, looking round the
corner, under the branches of the old
orchard, saw a white cat sitting under the
little window of the room where my grand-
uncle was laid out, and looking up at the
four small panes of glass as a cat will
watch a bird.

The end of it was that the cat was found
on the corpse again, when the room was
visited, and do what they might, whenever
the body was left alone, the cat was found
again in the same ill-omened contiguity
with the dead man. And this continued,
to the scandal and fear of the neighbourhood,
until the door was opened finally for
the wake.

My grand-uncle being dead, and, with
all due solemnities, buried, I have done
with him. But not quite yet with the
white cat. No banshee ever yet was more
inalienably attached to a family than this
ominous apparition is to mine. But there
is this difference. The banshee seems to
be animated with an affectionate sympathy
with the bereaved family to whom it is
hereditarily attached, whereas this thing
has about it a suspicion of malice. It is
the messenger simply of death. And its
taking the shape of a cat—the coldest, and
they say, the most vindictive of brutes—is
indicative of the spirit of its visit.

When my grandfather's death was near,
although he seemed quite well at the time,
it appeared not exactly, but very nearly in
the same way in which I told you it showed
itself to my father.

The day before my Uncle Teigne was
killed by the bursting of his gun, it appeared
to him in the evening, at twilight, by the
lough, in the field where I saw the woman
who walked across the water, as I told you.
My uncle was washing the barrel of his gun
in the lough. The grass is short there, and
there is no cover near it. He did not know
how it approached; but the first he saw of
it, the white cat was walking close round
his feet, in the twilight, with an angry
twist of its tail, and a green glare in its
eyes, and do what he would, it continued
walking round and round him, in larger or
smaller circles, till he reached the orchard,
and there he lost it.

My poor Aunt Peg—she married one of
the O'Brians, near Oolah—came to
Drumgunniol to go to the funeral of a cousin who
died about a mile away. She died herself,
poor woman, only a month after.

Coming from the wake, at two or three
o'clock in the morning, as she got over the
style into the farm of Drumgunniol, she
saw the white cat at her side, and it kept
close beside her, she ready to faint all the
time, till she reached the door of the house,
where it made a spring up into the whitethorn
tree that grows close by, and so it
parted from her. And my little brother Jim
saw it also, just three weeks before he died.
Every member of our family who dies, or
takes his death-sickness, at Drumgunniol,
is sure to see the white cat, and no one of
us who sees it need hope for long life after.

PAUL JONES RIGHTED.

OUR old conception of Paul Jones as a
bearded ruffian with a pistol in each hand,
and four more in his belt, striking an
attitude on a flaming quarter-deck, must, we
fear, be thrown into the dust heap, to which
so many other historical bogies are daily
being consigned.

By recent American writers, Paul Jones,
whom we English have long since branded
as a mere mischievous pirate, ranks as a
great and successful naval commander,
patriot and hero, a Bayard indeed, without
fear and without reproach. The interesting
letters and documents on this subject
collected some years ago by Colonel Sherburne,
then Registrar of the Navy Department in
Washington, go far to prove that Paul
Jones was a much more honest, a much more
intellectual, and a much more important
person than we have hitherto given him
credit for being.

The American version of the life of this
singular man deserves attention. John
Paul Jones, the son of a gardener, who lived
in Artigland, in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright,
was born in 1747. As a child Paul
began to show predilections for the sea,
his favourite haunt being a grassy eminence,
from whence he could shout what he called
his orders to vessels entering the port in
Carse Thome. Born on the edge of the
Solway Firth, the boy took to the water as
naturally as a duck does to the pond, and
at twelve years old was sent to Whitehaven
and bound apprentice to a merchant who
traded with America, where Paul had an
elder brother already married and settled.
The death of this well-to-do brother in 1773