The savour of kinnikinnick passed along Magnetwan Avenue, and past the Public Library. Harvey was left, motionless, in the dusk among the white columbines. He held in his hands a red handkerchief. He lifted it, and breathed the rank smell that opened to him the gates of all his past. Shamefacedly, he brushed it with his lips.
THE BOG-WOOD BOX
“This is not a story,” Great-Aunt Hawthorne used to say, “it is just something that happened.”
Mr. Denis Duchesne first saw the box one evening in the shop window, behind a bowl of Japanese silver fish and a windflower blossoming in a blue china jug. It was a little box, quite plain, and by the look of it had lain long a-soaking in the black bog-water. He bought it for a shilling and threepence three farthings, and took it home to keep fiddle-strings in. And no sooner had he taken the lid off than out shone a little green light and a spark.
“ ’Tis glow worms in the box,” cried Denis, clapping it down. The little light went out quick as a blown candle at the word, and something skittered over his fingers like a flittermouse.
And that was the last leprechaun ever came out of Ireland.
Denis himself had come out of France as a bit of a boy. He taught music and dancing, and was little enough thought of, for all he was grown a fine young man with a wild brown eye and a way of wearing his clothes that set the Mayor’s sons by the ears. He had the lower floor of an old narrow house on the river, and at high tide the bowsprits of the barges used to knock the sandy cat off his window-sill. It was a queer cat, and it always swam ashore with no more fuss than a duck. There was more than one queer thing about that house, what with the Widow Macmurchison on the first floor and old Berry under the roof. And now there it was with a leprechaun loose in it and they not knowing.
Denis hunted for the jumping glow-worm all over the room on his hands and knees, and the sandy cat sat and smiled at him under its whiskers. Trust a sandy cat for knowing the ups and downs of things.
“The devil’s in the box,” cried young Denis, for he had hit his head against the table, “or maybe one of those luminous flies the mayor saw in the Indies.” And with that he coiled up all his spare fiddle-strings as neat as you please and put them in the box. Then he blew out his candle and sat in the window, with the tide fingering on the wet gray stone under him and the stars coming out above. He would sit there for an hour singing songs that he hoped Dorothy Macmurchison on the first floor might give an ear to. He had no more thought of leprechauns in his brown head than he had of sorrow; that was little enough.
And all the time there was the leprechaun hopping upstairs, and he not knowing.