The sound of the bell produced its full effect. The housekeeper rushed into the room, followed by a number of women, (the Irish præficæ), all ready to prescribe for the dying or weep for the dead,--all clapping their hard hands, or wiping their dry eyes. These hags all surrounded the bed; and to witness their loud, wild, and desperate grief, their cries of “Oh! he’s going, his honor’s going, his honor’s going,” one would have imagined their lives were bound up in his, like those of the wives in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, who were to be interred alive with their deceased husbands. Four of them wrung their hands and howled round the bed, while one, with all the adroitness of a Mrs Quickly, felt his honor’s feet, and “upward and upward,” and “all was cold as any stone.” Old Melmoth withdrew his feet from the grasp of the hag,--counted with his keen eye (keen amid the approaching dimness of death) the number assembled round his bed,--raised himself on his sharp elbow, and pushing away the housekeeper, (who attempted to settle his nightcap, that had been shoved on one side in the struggle, and gave his haggard, dying face, a kind of grotesque fierceness), bellowed out in tones that made the company start,--“What the devil brought ye all here?” The question scattered the whole party for a moment; but rallying instantly, they communed among themselves in whispers, and frequently using the sign of the cross, muttered “The devil,--Christ save us, the devil in his mouth the first word he spoke.” “Aye,” roared the invalid, “and the devil in my eye the first sight I see.” “Where,--where?” cried the terrified housekeeper, clinging close to the invalid in her terror, and half-hiding herself in the blanket, which she snatched without mercy from his struggling and exposed limbs. “There, there,” he repeated, (during the battle of the blanket), pointing to the huddled and terrified women, who stood aghast at hearing themselves arointed as the very demons they came to banish. “Oh! Lord keep your honor’s head,” said the housekeeper in a more soothing tone, when her fright was over; “and sure your honor knows them all, is’n’t _her_ name,--and _her_ name,--and _her_ name,”--and she pointed respectively to each of them, adding their names, which we shall spare the English reader the torture of reciting, (as a proof of our lenity, adding the last only, Cotchleen O’Mulligan), “Ye lie, ye b----h,” growled old Melmoth; “their name is Legion, for they are many,--turn them all out of the room,--turn them all out of doors,--if they howl at my death, they shall howl in earnest,--not for my death, for they would see me dead and damned too with dry eyes, but for want of the whiskey that they would have stolen if they could have got at it,” (and here old Melmoth grasped a key which lay under his pillow, and shook it in vain triumph at the old housekeeper, who had long possessed the means of getting at the spirits unknown to his “honor”), “and for want of the victuals