"I thought the Coroner's Jury found that he fell down the shaft?" I returned, accepting the conversational opening in the spirit in which it was offered. The matron winked at me with a mixture of compassion and confederacy. "Ah, the poor fellow was insured, and the jury were decent men, they wouldn't wish to have anything said that 'd put the wife out of the money." "The right men in the right place, evidently," said Andrew, who rather fancies his dry humour. "But apart from the climate and the architecture, was there any reason for suicide?" "I'm told he was a little annoyed," said an enormous old farmer, delicately. "It was the weather preyed on him," said the matron. "There was a vessel was coming round to him with coal and all sorts, weather-bound she was, in Kinsale, and in the latther end she met a rock, and she went down in a lump, and his own brother that was in her was drownded." "There were grounds for annoyance, I admit," said Andrew. The big farmer, who had, perhaps, been one of the jury, remarked non-committally that he wouldn't say much for the weather we were getting now, and there was one of them planets was after the moon always. We moved on to the yard, in which prospective buyers were prowling among wheelbarrows, coils of rope, ladders, and the various rubbish proper to such scenes, and Andrew discoursed of the accessories that would be needed for the repair of my eaveshoots, with the large-mindedness of the Government official who has his own spurs and another man's horse. He was in the act of assuring me that I should save half a man's wages by having a second long ladder, when some one in the house began to play on a piano, with knowledge and vigour. The effect on Captain Larpent was as when a hound, outside a covert, hears the voice of a comrade within. The room from which the music came was on the ground floor, the back door was open, and Andrew walked in. "That is one of those young ladies who have come here to make their fortunes with poultry," observed a melancholy-looking clergyman at my elbow, "Miss Longmuir, I expect; she is the musician. Her friend, Dr. Catherine Fraser, is here also. Wonderful young ladies--no wish for society. I begged them to come and live near my church--I offered them a spare corner of the churchyard for their hen-coops--all of no avail." I said that they seemed hard to please. "Very, very," assented the clergyman; "yet I assure you there is nothing cynical about them. They are merely recloozes." He sighed, on what seemed to be general grounds, and moved away.