Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/325

 from his mother, but it seems impossible that he had ever heard of pagan gods either from the priests or from a mother who could neither read nor write. Therefore he could scarcely have imagined such a story, save by some obscure and scarcely believable trick of atavism. Nor does it seem possible that the story was invented by the woman Maria Hazlett, who, brought up in a poorhouse and scarcely able to read or write, had certainly never heard of Dionysus or Bacchus. The Hazlett woman, now nearly seventy years old, appears to be a simple countrywoman with an extraordinary attachment for the soil and for the drunken old man to whom she devoted her entire life.

3. The incident of Miss Annie Spragg's return at dawn from Meeker's Gulch accompanied by the black he-goat. This could be said to have been only the hallucination of the drunken milkman but for the discovery in the bedroom of Miss Annie Spragg of the chains and the crude handcuffs with which her brother chained her up at night.

4. The fact that from among all the saints Shamus Bosanky chose instinctively as his patron Saint John the Shepherd.

5. The most singular and astonishing fact of all, that Shamus Bosanky ran out into the storm to meet his death at the very moment when Miss Annie Spragg lay dying in the Palazzo Gonfarini on the other side of the world. Her own death occurred in the early morning of the fifteenth of August. At midnight of the four-