After a short walk, Terry arrived at the precincts of the churchyard. It was a lovely summer’s night, the full moon shining gloriously, and myriads of pretty stars blinking and twinkling in the blue expanse, but all their native lustre was drowned in the borrowed splendour of the Queen of Heaven. Terry stood a moment to reconnoitre, and, resting on his spade, looked around with an anxious gaze. He could discover nothing; all was silent as the departed beneath his feet, except the murmuring of the river’s surges in the rear, or the barking of some village cur-dog in the hazy distance. He advanced to the grave of the Boccough, and in a few minutes the ghastly moonbeams shone full on the pale grim features of the dead. He snatched the nightcap quickly from the bald head of the corpse, put it in his pocket, and, notwithstanding the awe and superhuman terror under which he laboured, he chuckled with delight as he remarked the “dead weight” of the Boccough’s head-gear. He then closed the coffin, and as he proceeded to cover it, the clay and stones fell on it with an appalling and unearthly sound. The grave now covered up, the intrepid fellow again shouldered his spade, and sought the river’s margin, and as he strode hurriedly along its banks in the direction of his home, the splash of the otter and the diving of the water-hen more than once broke the thread of his lonely musings.
Terry was soon at his mother’s side, who since his departure had been on her knees, praying for his safe return. The nightcap was ripped up, and lo! three hundred golden guineas were the reward of Terry’s churchyard adventure! Stitched carefully in every part of the huge nightcap, the gold lay secure, so as not to attract the notice of any one, or cause the least suspicion of its proximity to the old man’s pericranium.
Terry and his mother were in ecstacies. Farms were already purchased in ideality, cattle bought, houses built, and even Terry began in his mind to make preparations for his wedding with Onny Kinshellagh, a rich farmer’s daughter of the neighbourhood, for whom he had breathed many a hopeless sigh, and who, in addition to her beauty, was possessed of fifty pounds in hard gold, a couple of good yearlings, and a feather-bed as broad as the “nine acres.”
The mother and son retired to bed, as happy as the certain possession of wealth, and the almost as certain expectations of honour and distinction, could make them. After a long time spent in constructing and condemning schemes for the future, Terry fell asleep. He had not slept long, however, when he started up with a loud scream, crying out, “the Boccough! the Boccough!” “Och, weary’s on him for a Boccough!” exclaimed the mother; “is he coming for the nightcap and the goold?”
“Oh, no,” said Terry, calmly; “but I was again dreaming of him, and I was frightened.”
“What did you dream to-night?” asked the old woman.
“I was dreaming that I was going over the foord by moonlight, and that I saw the Boccough walking on the water towards me; that he stopped at a certain big stone, and began to examine under with his hands; that I came up, and asked him what he was searching for, when he looked up with a frightful phiz, and cried out in a horrible voice, ‘For my red nightcap!’”
“God Almighty never opened one door but he opened two,” exclaimed old Kathleen. “Examine under that stone to-morrow, and by all the cottoners in Cork, you’ll find another ‘lob’ of money in it.”
“Faix, maybe so,” replied Terry; “it’s no harm to say ‘Godsend,’ and that God may make a thief of you before a liar.”
“Amen, achiernah,” replied Kathleen.