'And now, Sally, I'm safe in bed. Stir the fire, my old darling.' For
although it was the first week in May, the night was frosty. 'And tell
me all about the Tiled House again, and frighten me out of my wits.'
So good old Sally, whose faith in such matters was a religion, went off
over the well-known ground in a gentle little amble--sometimes subsiding
into a walk as she approached some special horror, and pulling up
altogether--that is to say, suspending her knitting, and looking with a
mysterious nod at her young mistress in the four-poster, or lowering her
voice to a sort of whisper when the crisis came.
So she told her how when the neighbours hired the orchard that ran up to
the windows at the back of the house, the dogs they kept there used to
howl so wildly and wolfishly all night among the trees, and prowl under
the walls of the house so dejectedly, that they were fain to open the
door and let them in at last; and, indeed, small need was there for
dogs; for no one, young or old, dared go near the orchard after
night-fall. No, the burnished golden pippins that peeped through the
leaves in the western rays of evening, and made the mouths of the
Ballyfermot school-boys water, glowed undisturbed in the morning
sunbeams, and secure in the mysterious tutelage of the night smiled
coyly on their predatory longings.
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