J. S. Le Fanus Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 | Page 8

laudable good nature, she had
supported from the period of his orphanage down to that of my story,
which finds him in his twentieth year. Peter was a good-natured slob of
a fellow, much more addicted to wrestling, dancing, and love-making,
than to hard work, and fonder of whiskey-punch than good advice. His
grandmother had a high opinion of his accomplishments, which indeed
was but natural, and also of his genius, for Peter had of late years begun
to apply his mind to politics; and as it was plain that he had a mortal
hatred of honest labour, his grandmother predicted, like a true
fortuneteller, that he was born to marry an heiress, and Peter himself
(who had no mind to forego his freedom even on such terms) that he
was destined to find a pot of gold. Upon one point both agreed, that
being unfitted by the peculiar bias of his genius for work, he was to
acquire the immense fortune to which his merits entitled him by means
of a pure run of good luck. This solution of Peter's future had the
double effect of reconciling both himself and his grandmother to his
idle courses, and also of maintaining that even flow of hilarious spirits
which made him everywhere welcome, and which was in truth the
natural result of his consciousness of approaching affluence.
It happened one night that Peter had enjoyed himself to a very late hour
with two or three choice spirits near Palmerstown. They had talked
politics and love, sung songs, and told stories, and, above all, had
swallowed, in the chastened disguise of punch, at least a pint of good
whiskey, every man.
It was considerably past one o'clock when Peter bid his companions
goodbye, with a sigh and a hiccough, and lighting his pipe set forth on
his solitary homeward way.
The bridge of Chapelizod was pretty nearly the midway point of his
night march, and from one cause or another his progress was rather
slow, and it was past two o'clock by the time he found himself leaning
over its old battlements, and looking up the river, over whose winding
current and wooded banks the soft moonlight was falling.
The cold breeze that blew lightly down the stream was grateful to him.
It cooled his throbbing head, and he drank it in at his hot lips. The
scene, too, had, without his being well sensible of it, a secret
fascination. The village was sunk in the profoundest slumber, not a

mortal stirring, not a sound afloat, a soft haze covered it all, and the
fairy moonlight hovered over the entire landscape.
In a state between rumination and rapture, Peter continued to lean over
the battlements of the old bridge, and as he did so he saw, or fancied he
saw, emerging one after another along the river bank in the little
gardens and enclosures in the rear of the street of Chapelizod, the
queerest little white-washed huts and cabins he had ever seen there
before. They had not been there that evening when he passed the bridge
on the way to his merry tryst. But the most remarkable thing about it
was the odd way in which these quaint little cabins showed themselves.
First he saw one or two of them just with the corner of his eye, and
when he looked full at them, strange to say, they faded away and
disappeared. Then another and another came in view, but all in the
same coy way, just appearing and gone again before he could well fix
his gaze upon them; in a little while, however, they began to bear a
fuller gaze, and he found, as it seemed to himself, that he was able by
an effort of attention to fix the vision for a longer and a longer time,
and when they waxed faint and nearly vanished, he had the power of
recalling them into light and substance, until at last their vacillating
indistinctness became less and less, and they assumed a permanent
place in the moonlit landscape.
"Be the hokey," said Peter, lost in amazement, and dropping his pipe
into the river unconsciously, "them is the quarist bits iv mud cabins I
ever seen, growing up like musharoons in the dew of an evening, and
poppin' up here and down again there, and up again in another place,
like so many white rabbits in a warren; and there they stand at last as
firm and fast as if they were there from the Deluge; bedad it's enough to
make a man a'most believe in the fairies."
This latter was a large concession from Peter, who was a bit of a
free-thinker, and spoke contemptuously in his ordinary conversation of
that class of agencies.
Having treated himself to a long last