This personage who had hunted the moon on many a summer’s night, had amongst other attributes the power of seeing fairies; nor was he in the least afraid of them. You would see him lifting up dock-leaves, and conversing with the people who lived below. He could tell half-connected tales of his doings with these folk, talking with his face half turned from you, and tracing with his thumb nail the extent of a crack in the fence he was leaning against, or the pattern of the door panel he was near; and he would tell you this and that, and the other thing, till all of a sudden his imagination would become too much for him, and with a whoop! off he would go vaulting the fence, and away across country like an india-rubber ball or a bounding kangaroo, to tell the rest of his tale to the rabbits. Just a grain more phosphorous, just a grain more ballast, and Micky Mooney might have been a poet of the Celtic school, and led a revival and written books. As it was, he had some of the poetic influence that makes for better things; in his company men tended to forget horses, dogs, rat-catching, whisky and girls, and turn their conversation to banshees, cluricaunes, cats with horns on their heads, and other topics of a similar nature. When Mr Fanshawe had parted from Patsy at the front door, the latter, turning his steps to the stable-yard, had found Micky Mooney seated on the bottom of a bucket, listening with open mouth to Moriarty, the rat-catcher, who was discoursing on psychical subjects, whilst Larry Lyburn stood by the harness room door cleaning a stirrup, listening also, or seeming to listen. All the time Moriarty had been talking, Micky Mooney had been working himself up, clapping the palms of his hands on his knees, twisting his mouth about and flinging his head from side to side. No sooner had Moriarty finished than he burst forth. “I know a lady aal dressed in white—I know a lady aal dressed in white,” began Micky, rocking himself on the bucket and staring with his big eyes through Patsy and a hundred miles beyond—“aal dressed in white, wid a crown of gowld; and it’s ‘Micky, come afther me,’ she says, whin I meets her in the woods, ‘and it’s crocks and crates of gowld I’ll be showin’ you,’ she says. And it’s to-night I’m to meet her down in the woods be the Druids’ althar—aal dressed in white, wid a——” “Arra! shut your head and get off the bucket,” said Mr Lyburn, who had finished cleaning the stirrup, and was now proceeding to water the horses, punctuating his remark with the toe of his boot on that part of Micky’s anatomy that was closest to the bucket. Mr Lyburn was not a poet. “Micky,” said Patsy, into whose arms the moon-struck one had been shot, “stop your nise and hould your bellowin’, and come afther me, for I’ve got a job for you.” He led the seer of visions by the left hand (the right was applied to the punctuation mark) round the angle of the stable wall to a quiet spot near the potato room window.