The history of Garnet Seabright, as it was understood in the neighborhood, was very briefly this: When Hugh was about six years of age Miss Joe received a letter from a distant relation living in Calvert County, beseeching her, for the Redeemer’s sake, to lose no time in hastening to the sick-bed of the writer, who was most anxious to see her before she died. Miss Joe had to rub her organ of eventuality before she could recognize in the writer a cousin, a wild young girl of exceeding beauty and willfulness, who had, years before, eloped with a soldier, a certain George Seabright, a distant relation of Captain Seabright. Miss Joe never slighted any appeal to her benevolence. She shut up house, left the island in care of Pontius Pilate, took Hugh to Huttontown and left him in charge of Mrs. Fig, the grocer’s wife, borrowed a mule, and set out for Calvert County. The house of her cousin she heard upon inquiry was a miserably poor cottage, with scarcely any cleared ground around it, and situated in the midst of a deep, dark forest. It was approached for miles only by a narrow bridle path. It was near nightfall when Miss Joe entered this lonesome path; it was quite dark before she got near the house. “Oh, good Lord! this is a great deal more lonesomer and more wilder than my sea-girt island they make such a fuss about; for there, at least, I could see an enemy a long ways off. But here! Lord, there might be an Injun, or a bandit, or more likely still, a runaway nigger, behind every tree. Get up, Jinny! Hark! Lord deliver us! what was that?” “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Highe! cheep! th-sh-sh-e-e-e-e!” laughed, screamed, chirped, chirruped a sharp, shrill voice, high up in the trees, or somewhere between them and the blinking stars. “Lord save us, what was that?” ejaculated Miss Joe, looking up at the branches overhead, in the direction of the eerie voice. And there she saw, in the dark, bright starlight, in the highest branches of the trees, among the green and glistening leaves, a little elfin face, with glittering eyes, and gleaming teeth and streaming hair, mopping and mowing at her—chattering, gibing, laughing, and screaming at her. “St. John and all the Holy Evangelists! St. Mary and all the Holy Virgins!—what’s that? It’s—it’s—a fairy—it’s—it’s—a brownie!” exclaimed Miss Joe, bursting out into a profuse perspiration. Miss Joe was neither cowardly nor superstitious, yet when the little elf, with its wild eyes and streaming hair, glided down the tree with the swiftness and celerity of a monkey down a mainmast, and leaped, with a yell of malice and delight, upon the mule, behind her, Miss Joe opened her throat with a prolonged shriek, that might have waked the dead. And at the same time the mule dashed, plunging and kicking, forward. The elf stuck its little hands into Miss Joe’s fat sides, and, as the good lady herself afterward said, clung there like a craw-fish or a crab. The mule plunged madly on.