At seven o’clock she woke, because seven o’clock was the hour at which she invariably rose. On the 17th of March she rose four minutes later than usual, taking that time to ponder her dream and feel her pulse. She looked anxiously at herself in the peculiarly unflattering mirror on the toilet-table, but it showed her the same long Scotch face as usual, and the green tinge imparted by the glass was no greener than it always was. Miss Kezia considered dreams a weakness due to illness or a diseased imagination, but halfway through her toilet a voice broke out:— "’Oh! Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that’s going round? The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground; Saint Patrick’s day no more we’ll keep, his colour can’t be seen. For there’s a cruel law agin’ the wearin’ of the green....’" Miss Kezia stood, the cold water trickling down her face, and experienced a queer sort of sensation. Where had she heard that tune—sad even to her tough senses—quite lately? Why did her dream suddenly descend upon her, the sense of it gripping her most unaccountably? A scream of woe in Molly’s most material voice, "Oh, I’ve hammered my thumb into the middle of next month!" and the heavy fall of a hammer roused her suddenly, sharply, to full realisation and understanding of her dream. To the accompaniment of a steady hammering she finished her ablutions with a grim and wrathful haste. She faced the unflattering mirror with a gleam in her eye, and pulled and screwed her hair into its accustomed tight knot. She finished her toilet, and then she left her room. Green met her eye; whichever way she turned she encountered green. The balusters were draped with green muslin. The austere photograph of a long-faced ancestor hanging, a perpetual prim disdainer of the follies of youth, on the wall opposite her door, looked out now disapprovingly from beneath a coquettish green satin bow hanging over his very brows. Sheila Pat came marching down the stairs, holding aloft the Irish flag. "Are you all mad?" Miss Kezia queried wrathfully. The Atom turned an eye alight with a far-away scorn upon her. "It’s St. Patrick’s Day!" she said curtly, and marched on down the stairs. Miss Kezia put up with a good deal that day. She sat at the breakfast-table and faced, with strong but silent disapproval, a green-draped window. She said no word even when Sarah wriggled shyly in, her diminutive cap adorned with a great green bow. But her eye followed the hot and abashed little hand-maiden with dire meaning. When next Sarah appeared the bow had vanished. She watched, from beneath raised brows, Kate Kearney tumbling over her own head in pursuit of the ribbon tied about her neck, but she did not say anything. After breakfast a box came by parcel’s post addressed to Nell. It was a large box, and it was filled with shamrock. Miss Kezia studied it amiably. "I suppose it is a pretty little weed," she said with affability.