Then she had actually heard the Benshee cry. It came wailing around the house when her father died; and she had heard it a week before his death, when he was hale and hearty. She had heard it at night-fall one evening when she was crossing the glen below their cottage, as she was coming from Coleraine, where she had been spending the day with her grandmother. It commenced “low and mournful like” in the bushes beside her, and then ranged around the hills, swelling out louder and louder, until it ceased behind the cottage. As she would dwell on this, my fancy would picture to me the enthusiastic, imaginative Irish girl, standing with lips apart, listening to this mournful wailing night-wind, which her after troubles shaped into the sad poetical Benshee; and if I had had the skill of an artist, I would have made a lovely sketch, I am sure; for so plainly did her descriptions bring before me her figure and the surrounding landscape, lightened with the warm hue of the lingering twilight so peculiar to Ireland. Bridget sat down on the rug beside me, and when we went to bed that night, good reader, it was later than unsuspecting Aunt Mary imagined; but I had heard all Bridget’s troubles, had soothed and comforted her, had read her lover’s last letter to her—for she had a lover—what girl has not?—and sent her to bed with a heart considerably lighter than when, with aching head but patient fingers, she had prepared my nice night meal. Bridget’s father, Dermot Kerevan, was a Scotchman by birth, but of Irish parentage. His father had settled in Glasgow, and there did Dermot spend his early years, and obtain thriftiness and steadiness, qualities not often found in an Irishman. Dermot was early apprenticed to a gardener, and when he was out of his term of service, his master recommended him to an Irish gentleman, who wanted a gardener for his place, “The Forest,” at Coleraine. There Dermot came, and it was not long before he brought home to his pretty gardener’s-cottage, the beauty of Coleraine, Grace Mullen, who he had persuaded to be his “_bonnie wife_,” as he called her. They must have been very happy—for sweeter domestic pictures I have never heard described, either in tale or poem, than my good Bridget would sketch in her little stories of their home, during her father’s life. But this blessed happiness could not last for ever. One fine spring day poor Dermot was brought home from the garden, up at “the great house,” on a litter, nearly dead. He had fallen from a high tree while lopping off a branch. He lingered only a few hours, leaving the lonely widow with her “four childer,” to battle with life alone.