Many years after, as will sometimes happen, a flood of light was unexpectedly poured over the details of his narrative; on my coming into possession of the diary, curiously minute, and the voluminous correspondence of Rebecca, sister to General Chattesworth, with whose family I had the honour to be connected.  And this journal, to me, with my queer cat-like affection for this old village, a perfect treasure—­and the interminable bundles of letters, sorted and arranged so neatly, with little abstracts of their contents in red ink, in her own firm thin hand upon the covers, from all and to all manner of persons—­for the industrious lady made fair copies of all the letters she wrote—­formed for many years my occasional, and always pleasant winter night’s reading.

I wish I could infuse their spirit into what I am going to tell, and above all that I could inspire my readers with ever so little of the peculiar interest with which the old town has always been tinted and saddened to my eye.  My boyish imagination, perhaps, kindled all the more at the story, by reason of it being a good deal connected with the identical old house in which we three—­my dear uncle, my idle self, and the queer old soldier—­were then sitting.  But wishes are as vain as regrets; so I’ll just do my best, bespeaking your attention, and submissively abiding your judgment.

CHAPTER I.

THE RECTOR’S NIGHT-WALK TO HIS CHURCH.

A.D. 1767—­in the beginning of the month of May—­I mention it because, as I said, I write from memoranda, an awfully dark night came down on Chapelizod and all the country round.

I believe there was no moon, and the stars had been quite put out under the wet ‘blanket of the night,’ which impenetrable muffler overspread the sky with a funereal darkness.

There was a little of that sheet-lightning early in the evening, which betokens sultry weather.  The clouds, column after column, came up sullenly over the Dublin mountains, rolling themselves from one horizon to the other into one black dome of vapour, their slow but steady motion contrasting with the awful stillness of the air.  There was a weight in the atmosphere, and a sort of undefined menace brooding over the little town, as if unseen crime or danger—­some mystery of iniquity—­was stealing into the heart of it, and the disapproving heavens scowled a melancholy warning.

That morning old Sally, the rector’s housekeeper, was disquieted.  She had dreamed of making the great four-post, state bed, with the dark green damask curtains—­a dream that betokened some coming trouble—­it might, to be sure, be ever so small—­(it had once come with no worse result than Dr. Walsingham’s dropping his purse, containing something under a guinea in silver, over the side of the ferry boat)—­but again it might be tremendous.  The omen hung over them doubtful.