"Mrs. Sheridan didn't die that night, not till the end of the week; and the neighbours heard her talking about the child that she buried, and then they all knew what the white thing was that had been seen by the roadside. And the night that the priest left her he saw the white thing standing in front of him; and if he hadn't been a priest he would have dropped down dead. But he knew well enough that it was the unbaptised child, and he took some water from the bog-hole and dashed it over it, saying, "I baptise thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." The driver told his story like one saying his prayers, and he seemed to have forgotten that he had a listener. "And the ghost hasn't been seen again?" I said. "No, not that I know of." "I don't like your story," I said. "I like the story about Julia Cahill better." "Well, they're both true; one's as true as the other; and Julia and Margaret are in America. Once a woman is wake she must go to America." "It must have been a great shock to the priest." "Faith it was, sir, to meet an unbaptised child on the roadside, and the child the only bastard that was ever born in the parish,--so Tom Mulhare says, and he's the oldest man in the county of Mayo." "It was altogether a very queer idea, this playhouse." "It was indeed, sir, a queer idea; but you see he's a queer man. He has been always thinking of something to do good; and it is said that he thinks too much. Father James is a very queer man, your honour." At the end of a long silence, interrupted now and then by the melancholy cry with which he encouraged his horse, he began another story, how Father James MacTurnan had written to the Pope asking that the priests might marry, "so afeard was he that the Catholics were going to America and the country would become Protestant. And there's James Murdoch's cabin, and he is the man that got the five pounds that the bishop gave Father James to buy a pig." And when I asked him how he knew all these things, he said, "There isn't many days in the year that the old grey horse and myself don't do five-and-twenty miles, and I'm often in and out of Rathowen." "There is no doubt," I said to myself, "that this car-driver is the legitimate descendant of the ancient bards." CHAPTER VIII THE WEDDING-GOWN