seemed to traverse his body, as if he had
been cut through with a leaf of steel. But
he was without scathe or scar, as he
afterwards found. .

At the same moment he saw the whole
cavalcade break into a gallop and disappear
down the hill, with a momentary hurtling
in the air, like the flight of a volley of
cannon shot.

Here had been the earl himself!  He
had tried one of his accustomed stratagems
to lead the smith to speak to him.  For it
is well known that either for the purpose
of abridging or of mitigating his period of
enchantment, he seeks to lead people to
accost him.  But what, in the event of his
succeeding, would befal the person whom
he had thus ensnared, no one knows.

MOLL RIAL'S ADVENTURE.

When Miss Anne Baily was a child,
Moll Rial was an old woman.  She had
lived all her days with the Bailys of Lough
Guir; in and about whose house, as was
the Irish custom of those days, were a
troop of bare-footed country girls, scullery
maids, or laundresses, or employed
about the poultry yard, or running of
errands.

Among these was Mary Rial, then a
stout good-humoured lass, with little to
think of, and nothing to fret about.  She
was once washing clothes, by the process
known universally in Munster as beatling.
The washer stands up to her ankles in
water, in which she has immersed the
clothes, which she lays in that state on a
great flat stone, and smacks with lusty
strokes of an instrument which bears a rude
resemblance to a cricket bat, only shorter,
broader, and light enough to be wielded
freely with one hand.  Thus, they smack
the dripping clothes, turning them over
and over, sousing them in the water, and
replacing them on the same stone, to
undergo a repetition of the process, until
they are thoroughly washed.

Moll Rial was plying her " beatle " at
the margin of the lake, close under the old
house and castle.  It was between eight
and nine o'clock on a fine summer morning,
everything looked bright and beautiful.
Though quite alone, and though she could
not see even the windows of the house
(hidden from her view by the irregular
ascent and some interposing bushes), her
loneliness was not depressing.

Standing up from her work, she saw a
gentleman walking slowly down the slope
toward her.  He was a "grand-looking"
gentleman, arrayed in a flowered silk dressing-
gown, with a cap of velvet on his head;
and as he stepped toward her, in his slippered
feet, he showed a very handsome leg.  He was
smiling graciously as he approached, and
drawing a ring from his finger with an
air of gracious meaning, which seemed to
imply that he wished to make her a present;
he raised it in his fingers with a pleased
look, and placed it on the flat stones
beside the clothes she had been beatling so
industriously.

He drew back a little, and continued to
look at her with an encouraging smile,
which seemed to say: " You have earned
your reward; you must not be afraid to
take it."

The girl fancied that this was some
gentleman who had arrived, as often
happened in those hospitable and haphazard
times, late and unexpectedly the night
before, and who was now taking a little
indolent ramble before breakfast.

Moll Rial was a little shy, and more so
at having been discovered by so grand a
gentleman with her petticoats gathered a
little high about her bare shins.  She
looked down, therefore, upon the water at
her feet, and then she saw a ripple of
blood, and then another, ring after ring,
coming and going to and from her feet.
She cried out the sacred name in horror,
and, lifting her eyes, the courtly gentleman
was gone, but the blood-rings about
her feet spread with the speed of light over
the surface of the lake, which for a moment
glowed like one vast estuary of blood.

Here was the earl once again, and Moll
Rial declared that if it had not been for
that frightful transformation of the water
she would have spoken to him next minute,
and would thus have passed under a spell,
perhaps as direful as his own.

THE BANSHEE.

So old a Munster family as the Bailys,
of Lough Guir, could not fail to have their
attendant banshee.  Every one attached to
the family knew this well, and could cite
evidences of that unearthly distinction.  I
heard Miss Baily relate the only experience
she had personally had of that wild spiritual
sympathy.

She said that, being then young, she and
Miss Susan undertook a long attendance
upon the sick bed of their sister, Miss Kitty,
whom I have heard remembered among
her contemporaries as the merriest and
most entertaining of human beings.  This
light-hearted young lady was dying of
consumption.