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 crone, leaning over Aram's oak chair, uttered from thence her sibyl bodings.

"No," replied Mother Darkmans, "I seed him go out an hour agone, when the sun was just on the rise; an' I said, when I seed him stream into the wood yonder, and the ould leaves splashed in the damp under his feet; and his hat was aboon his brows, and his lips went so; I said, says I, 'tis not the man that will make a hearth bright, that would walk thus on his marriage day. But I knows what I knows; and I minds what I seed last night."

"Why, what did you see last night?" asked the listener, with a trembling voice, for Mother Darkmans was a great teller of ghost and witch tales; and a certain ineffable awe of her dark gipsy features and malignant words, had circulated pretty largely throughout the village.

"Why, I sat up here with the ould deaf woman, and we were a drinking the health of the man, and his wife that is to be, and it was nigh twelve o' the clock ere I minded it was time to go