She believed in ghosts most firmly. She said that her mother had seen so many in Ireland that she simply took no notice of them. They were in every room in the house and up and down the stairs. They used to ring the bells when nothing was wanted and knock people about when they got in their way, and whenever anybody died or anything was going to happen they made a horrible noise outside the windows in the night. Once, she said, she passed a woman nursing her own head on a stone by the roadside, and they just looked at one another, but neither of them spoke. A gentleman in a nightshirt had hanged himself from a hook in the middle of the ceiling in the servants’ bedroom, before my grandfather came to the house, and the housemaid said his spirit haunted the top storey. She woke up one night and saw a figure standing in the middle of the room and looking at her. She knew it was the same gentleman, because he still wore his nightshirt and had the rope round his neck, and he was standing just underneath the place where the hook would have been had it not been taken down when the ceiling was whitewashed. He was looking at her fixedly. If he had looked the other way he might have noticed the cook in the other bed as well, and that would have been some relief. But he didn’t. He gazed and gazed as though his heart was going to break. She was so frightened that she shook the bed with trembling; and she shut her eyes and put her hand under the pillow and got out her rosary, and said five “Hail Mary’s.” And when she opened them again he was still there, only not quite so solid. After another five he had got so misty that she could see the furniture through him, and after the third five he had disappeared. But she was so terrified, she said, that she didn’t get a wink of sleep that night, and when she woke in the morning her nightdress and sheets were quite damp with terror. The cook didn’t believe it. She said it was pure popery. She was sure no ghost could possibly come in in the night like that without her noticing it, because she was such a light sleeper. But as a matter of fact, she snored so dreadfully that my grandfather once asked a builder for an estimate for padding the walls of the servants’ room all round so that she couldn’t be heard on the floor underneath, but she was so offended that it wasn’t padded. They sometimes used to laugh at the housemaid in the kitchen for being a Catholic. But she didn’t care. She stuck to her religion. She was so certain that the Virgin Mary was taking care of her, or she would have been worse hurt in the dreadful accidents she used to have. She said no living being could have stood it without divine protection. When she was doing something that she thought really might be dangerous, she just said, “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, help!” and took more care, and nothing happened.