“Mother o’ Mercy,” she screeched, “it’s his ghost. It’s his ghost, Louisa. Louisa, will ye hide me somewhere, for God’s sake!” “Ghost yer gran’mother,” came a cracked, old voice. “Get up an’ open the door will ye, till we see what he wants.” “No, no—” began Katie’s voice again. Gypo put his shoulder to the door, burst the piece of string that fastened it on the inside to a nail in the wall, and flung the door open wide. He stalked into the room. At first the whole room appeared to be a blue bank of fog. Then the blue mist dissipated gradually. The room assumed proportions. Things swam out of the mist towards him gracefully, in the order of their importance. First came the lamp. It was placed on the black, wooden mantelpiece over the fireplace. It was an ordinary tin paraffin lamp, painted red. The chimney was three-parts black. Next came the fireplace. There was a huge, open grate, with a turf fire burning in it. The fire was more like the remains of a funeral pyre, because the ashes had accumulated for weeks. The flaming peat sods lay stretched like fallen logs on the top of the great pile of yellow ashes. Next came the bed, with Louisa Cummins lying in one corner of it. The bed was so huge that it might be mistaken for anything were it not supported by four thick wooden posts and had a canopy over it, at the head, after the fashion of those beds that are called in Irish country places “Archbishops’ Beds.” The bed-clothes were indescribable. Everything was pitched on to the bed and everything stayed there. Louisa Cummins lived in the bed most of the day. She had done so for eight years, since she became “bedridden” as the result of “injuries” received from the police, one night she was arrested on a charge of trafficking in immorality. She was quite strong and healthy. She did all her work in bed. The blankets were gathered about her bulky person in the far corner, near the wall. In the other corner, Katie Fox’s corner, there was a couple or so of tattered blankets. The foot of the bed was heaped with junk of all sorts, from a notched mug, out of which the old lady drank her tea, to a statue of Saint Joseph that hung on the bed-post, suspended from a thick nail by a rough, knotted cord. The cord was around the statue’s neck, in a noose. The statue was not suspended there out of crude respect, as might be supposed. It was hung there as a blasphemous protest against the incompetence of the saint. Four years before she had made a Novena to Saint Joseph, requesting a cure for muscular rheumatism, and because her request was not granted she hung up the statue by the neck.