When I had leisure to reflect, I considered, that as yet I had no proof of the truth of Ellinor’s strange story, except her own assertions. I sent for her again, to examine her more particularly. I was aware that, if I alarmed her, I should so confuse her imagination, that I should never obtain the truth; therefore I composed myself, and assumed my usual external appearance of nonchalance. I received her lolling upon my sofa, as usual, and I questioned her merely as if to gratify an idle curiosity. “Troth, dear,” said she, “I’ll tell you the whole story how it was, to make your mind asy, which, God knows, mine never was, from that minute it first came into my head, till this very time being. You mind the time you got the cut in your head--no, not you, jewel; but the little lord that was then, Christy there below that is.--Well, the cut was a terrible cut as ever you seen, got by a fall on the fender from the nurse’s arms, that was drunk, three days after he was born.” “I remember to have heard my father talk of some accident of this sort, which happened to me when I was an infant.” “Ay, sure enough it did, and that was what first put him in the notion of taking the little lord out of the hands of the Dublin nurse-tenders, and them that were about my Lady Glenthom, and did not know how to manage her, which was the cause of her death: and he said he’d have his own way about his son and heir any way, and have him nursed by a wholesome woman in a cabin, and brought up hardy, as he, and the old lord, and all the family, were before him. So with that he sends for me, and he puts the young lord, God bless him, into my arms himself, and a _donny_ thing he was that same time to look at, for he was but just out of the surgeon’s hands, the head just healed and scarred over like; and my lord said there should be no more doctors never about him. So I took him, that is, Christy, and you, to a house at the sea, for the salt water, and showed him every justice; and my lord often came to see him whilst he was in the country; but then he was off, after a time, to Dublin, and I was in a lone place, where nobody came, and the child was very sick with me, and you was all the time as fine and thriving a child as ever you see; and I thought, to be sure, one night, that he would die wid me. He was very bad, very bad indeed; and I was sitting up in bed, rocking him backwards and forwards this ways: I thought with myself, what a pity it was, the young lord should die, and he an only son and heir, and the estate to go out of the family the Lord knows where; and then the grief the father would be in: and then I thought how happy he would be if he had such a fine _babby_ as you, dear; and you was a fine _babby_ to be sure: and then I thought how happy it would be for you, if you was in the place of the little lord: and then it came into my head, just like a shot, where would be the harm to change you? for I thought