Meantime the trial of O'Donnegan approached. He was arraigned, convicted and sentenced, in a shorter space of time than I ever heard of in the trial of any criminal. Many people thought that the prosecution was conducted in a vindictive spirit, and that the friends of the deceased exerted every faculty, sparing neither influence nor expense in the pursuit of a conviction. They retained the best counsel in the country to assist the State's attorney, while on the other hand the poor wretch of a prisoner had no defense except that appointed for him by the court. However that might be, in the short space of one month from the time of committing the homicide, he was sentenced to die, and in six weeks from his conviction he expiated his crime upon the scaffold. It was about the middle of September, of that eventful year, when a rumor arose--as all rumors arise, mysteriously--that the Willow Cottage was haunted; that ghostly lights flitted through its chambers; that ghostly revelers held midnight orgies in its deserted halls; and that the murderer and the murdered still played their game at ninepins, or waged their last war along its lonely corridors. While these reports were rife in the neighborhood, our Grandmother Hawkins turned a deaf ear, or threw in a good-humored, sarcastic word to the marvel-mongers--upon one occasion launching at them and us the time-honored proverb: "You will never see anything worse than yourselves, my dears." "I believe you, mistress, honey! for long as I lib on dis yeth, and feared as I is o' ghoses, I nebber see nothin' worse nor myse'f yet--dough, the Lord betune me an' harm, I sartinly saw de debbil once--I did," observed old Cassy, sapiently. "If no one else takes the Willow Cottage beforehand, just wait until my term is up here, and then if Mr. Buzzard will let it to a small, quiet family on anything like reasonable terms, you'll see how we meet spectres," said our grandmother. "Too late, Aunt Rachel! The Willow Cottage is let," exclaimed Will Rackaway, who had a few minutes previously joined our party. "Let, is it? Ah! well, I hope it is not to another rum-seller!" "No, indeed! to another guess tenant! to Colonel Manly, of the ---- regiment, who is now ordered to join General Armistead, in Florida, and who takes the cottage as a pleasant country home for his wife and children during his absence." "Hum-m me! then we shall have neighbors. I am very well reconciled," said Mrs. Hawkins. A few weeks after this conversation the new tenants were settled in the Willow Cottage, and the colonel embarked for Florida. Grandmother Hawkins was rather slow and ceremonious in all her dealings with society. Therefore she "took her time" in calling upon Mrs. Manly. Consequently, upon the very morning that she set out to pay that lady a visit she met a train of furniture drays proceeding from the premises, and heard to her great astonishment that the family were moving away.