He did not speak, and all his train were silent, but he beckoned to the smith, and pointed down to one of his horse’s hoofs.

Teigue stooped and raised it, and held it just long enough to see that it was shod with a silver shoe; which, in one place, he said, was worn as thin as a shilling.  Instantaneously, his situation was made apparent to him by this sign, and he recoiled with a terrified prayer.  The lordly rider, with a look of pain and fury, struck at him suddenly, with something that whistled in the air like a whip; and an icy streak seemed to traverse his body as if he had been cut through with a leaf of steel.  But he was without scathe or scar, as he afterwards found.  At the same moment he saw the whole cavalcade break into a gallop and disappear down the hill, with a momentary hurtling in the air, like the flight of a volley of cannon shot.

Here had been the earl himself.  He had tried one of his accustomed stratagems to lead the smith to speak to him.  For it is well known that either for the purpose of abridging or of mitigating his period of enchantment, he seeks to lead people to accost him.  But what, in the event of his succeeding, would befall the person whom he had thus ensnared, no one knows.

Moll Rial’s Adventure

When Miss Anne Baily was a child, Moll Rial was an old woman.  She had lived all her days with the Bailys of Lough Guir; in and about whose house, as was the Irish custom of those days, were a troop of bare-footed country girls, scullery maids, or laundresses, or employed about the poultry yard, or running of errands.

Among these was Moll Rial, then a stout good-humoured lass, with little to think of, and nothing to fret about.  She was once washing clothes by the process known universally in Munster as beetling.  The washer stands up to her ankles in water, in which she has immersed the clothes, which she lays in that state on a great flat stone, and smacks with lusty strokes of an instrument which bears a rude resemblance to a cricket bat, only shorter, broader, and light enough to be wielded freely with one hand.  Thus, they smack the dripping clothes, turning them over and over, sousing them in the water, and replacing them on the same stone, to undergo a repetition of the process, until they are thoroughly washed.

Moll Rial was plying her “beetle” at the margin of the lake, close under the old house and castle.  It was between eight and nine o’clock on a fine summer morning, everything looked bright and beautiful.  Though quite alone, and though she could not see even the windows of the house (hidden from her view by the irregular ascent and some interposing bushes), her loneliness was not depressing.

Standing up from her work, she saw a gentleman walking slowly down the slope toward her.  He was a “grand-looking” gentleman, arrayed in a flowered silk dressing-gown, with a cap of velvet on his head; and as he stepped toward her, in his slippered feet, he showed a very handsome leg.  He was smiling graciously as he approached, and drawing a ring from his finger with an air of gracious meaning, which seemed to imply that he wished to make her a present, he raised it in his fingers with a pleased look, and placed it on the flat stones beside the clothes she had been beetling so industriously.