Her sense of hospitality was warm and unlimited. Dennis she welcomed with a "Troth an' 'tis yourself, Dennis, me boy." For me she placed a chair opposite her own, and sometimes, in the midst of her enjoyment, stopped to help me to a spoonful of the stimulating liquid from her tumbler, remarking with a wink that it brightened my eyes and considerably heightened my beauty. It certainly made me cough, sputter, and smartened my eyelids with the quick sensation of tears, and then she would meditatively refer to the days when she too was young, and had pink cheeks and eyes the boys thought were never intended for the salvation of her soul. I was a curious child, and was eager for an explanation of the dark saying, on which Dennis would chuck my chin, with the liveliest of sympathetic grimaces across at the irresistible Mary Ann, which made the saying darker still, and Mary Ann would fling herself back in her chair convulsed with laughter. "Ah, Miss Angela, 'twas the devil of a colleen I was in thim days, most outrageous, with a foot, I tell ye, as light as thim cratures as dances be moonlight. Sure didn't I once dance down Rory Evans in the big barn of Farmer Donoghue's at Clonakilty, when there was that cheering, I tell ye, fit to lift the roof off the house." At this point she invariably illustrated the tale of her terpsichorean prowess in a legendary past by what she called "illigant step dancing," and endeavoured to teach me the Irish jig. She observed with indulgent contempt that I showed a fine capacity for the stamping and whirling and the triumphant shout, but I failed altogether in the noble science of "step dancing." But what I preferred to the dancing, exciting as it was, were the ghost-stories, the legends of banshees, the thrilling and beautiful tales of the Colleen Bawn and Feeney the Robber. Those two were for long the hero and heroine of my infancy. Gerald Griffin's romance she, oddly enough, knew by heart. I forget now most of the names of the persons of the drama, but at seven I knew them all as dear and intimate friends: the forlorn young man who wrote those magic lines, "A place in thy memory, dearest"--did even Shelley later ever stir my bosom with fonder and deeper and less lucid emotions than those provoked by those tinkling lines, breathed from the soul of Mary Ann upon the fumes of punch?--the perfidious hero who once, like Mary Ann, drank too much and danced a jig when he ought to have been otherwise engaged, Miles, Anne Chute, and the lovely betrayed Eily. I knew them all, wept for them as I had never wept for myself, and was only lifted out of a crushing sense of universal woe when Dennis produced an orange, which was his habit whenever he saw me on the point of succumbing under alien disaster.