It had happened more than twenty years ago in the county of Kerry—Abner was none the wiser—in the very first situation that Mick Connor had ever taken. ‘There was money in Ireland them days,’ he said. ‘The country’s gone to the dogs ever sence the Boer War.’ He was engaged as pantry-boy, at six pounds a year and a suit of clothes, and he earned it by cleaning thirty lamps and a dozen pair of shoes every morning before breakfast and waiting at meal-times in the servants’ hall. The rest of the day he spent in dodging the butler, an ould devil with a lip would trip a duck, who liked his pint more than most and used to threaten to take the skin off of him with a twig whenever he saw him. The story seemed to lead nowhere, but Mick Connor’s voice was low and persuasive and he evidently liked talking. Abner lay and listened. Even in those early days Mick Connor had been used to the open air. He hated house-work, he said, and would often go off and hide himself under the dining-room table, a place of concealment which the butler at last discovered, to cry. He would stand at the pantry windows looking out over the fields to the river where the third footman was already enjoying himself catching eels and perch in the holes. The house was a prison to him. The only friend that ever came to him from outside it was a wolfhound who slept in the stables, but with whom he had made great friends ever since he had been in the house by feeding it with scraps from the pantry. The butler hated dogs, and this dog above all others because it had once stolen a ham. Mick loved it and fed it regularly. It used to jump up to the pantry window and lick his face through the bars. When he had been in this place for a year or more the family moved for the summer to another house on the coast some thirty miles away. For Mick it was a happy change. He and his friend the third footman were chosen to go there and the savage butler was left behind. There were no railways in that part of Ireland, and so they went to Coulagh by road. The children were to follow with their nurse the next day, so the footman and the cook preceded them in a wagonette loaded with luggage. They went slowly, and behind them walked Mick, leading two pannier asses named Haidee and Mokie, on which the children would go for rides by the shore. They started late and the last part of their journey was made in the dark. The cook, who had a drop taken, was telling ghost stories fitting to that wild hour and place. There was one tale in particular of how she had met the devil in the flesh sitting by a milestone near Coulagh three years before that made Mick afraid to look on either side of him. He walked with Haidee on his right and Mokie on his left and the tail of the wagonette in front of him, and even then he didn’t feel safe.