“Well; not mutton, to-day, Ma’am.”
“Some beef?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Some veal?”
“Not any veal, I’m afraid.”
“Well, then, a fowl?”
“We haven’t got a fowl.”
“What on earth have you got, then?”
“Well, then, Ma’am, I’m afeared if you won’t have the fine pair of ducks, there’s nothing for it but bacon and eggs!”
We went first to Drumcar and next (a two days’ drive) to Moydrum Castle which then belonged to my father’s cousin, old Lady Castlemaine. Another old cousin in the house showed me where, between two towers covered with ivy, she had looked one dark night out of her bedroom window on hearing a wailing noise below, and had seen some white object larger than any bird, floating slowly up and then sinking down into the shadow below again, and yet again. Of course it was the Banshee; and somebody had died afterwards! We also had our Banshee at Newbridge about that time. One stormy and rainy Sunday night in October my father was reading a sermon as usual to the assembled household, and the family, gathered near the fire in what we were wont to call on these evenings “Sinner’s chair” and the “Seat of the Scornful,” were rather somnolent, when the most piercing and unearthly shrieks arose apparently just outside the windows in the pleasure ground, and startled us all wide awake. At the head of the row of servants sat our dear old housekeeper “Joney” then the head-gardener’s wife, who had adopted a child of three years old, and this evening had left him fast asleep in the housekeeper’s room, which was under part of the drawing-room. Naturally she and all of us supposed that “Johnny” had wakened and was screaming on finding himself alone; and though the outcries were not like those of a child, “Joney” rose and hastily passed down the room and went to look after her charge. To reach the housekeeper’s room she necessarily passed the servants’ hall and out of it rushed the coachman—a big, usually red-faced Englishman, whom she declared was on that occasion as pale as death. The next instant one of the housemaids, who had likewise played truant from prayers, came tottering down from a bedroom (so remote that I have always wondered how any noise below the drawing-room could have reached it), and sunk fainting on a chair. The little boy meanwhile was sleeping like a cherub in undisturbed repose in a clothes basket! What that wild noise was,—heard by at least two dozen people,—we never learned and somehow did not care much to investigate.