The Bunsby papers Part 40

There, close to him, was the identical branch on which had perched the legion of little pipers; a short distance from him was the mazy hollow through which he had so singularly forced his way; half hoping to find some evidence of the apparently vivid facts that he had witnessed, he put his hand into his breeches pocket, but only fished out a piece of pig-tail tobacco.

As he ran over every well-remembered circ.u.mstance, he became still more puzzled. It was clear enough that he had been asleep, as he had but just woke up; but then he was equally certain that he was wide awake when the leprechaun touched his eyelids with the osier. Indeed, he looked round in the expectation of seeing it lying somewhere about; but there was no trace of such a thing.

The conclusion he came to was a characteristic one. "By the mortial,"

said he, as, taking up his pipes, he sauntered down the mountain-road, "there's somethin' quare in it, sure enough; but it's beyant my comprehendin'. The divil a use is there in botherin' my brains about it; all I know is, that there's a mighty extensive hive o' bees singin'

songs inside of my hat this blessed mornin'. I must put some whisky in an' drownd out the noisy varmints."

The chronicler of this veracious history regrets exceedingly that he cannot, with any regard to the strict truth, bring it to a conclusion in the usual moral-pointing style, except in its general tendency, which he humbly considers to be wholesome and suggestive; but the hero of the tale--the good-for-nothing, wild roysterer, Terry, who ought, of course, to have profited by the lesson he had received and to have become a sober, steady, useful, somewhat bilious, but in every way respectable, member of society, dressed in solemn black, and petted religiously by extatical elderly ladies, did not a.s.sist the conventional denouement in the remotest degree. With grief I am compelled to record the humiliating fact, that Terry waxed wilder than ever, drank deeper, frolicked longer, and kicked up more promiscuous s.h.i.+ndies than before, and invariably wound up the account of his fairy adventures, which in process of time he believed in most implicitly, by exclaiming:

"What a murdherin' fool I was not to take the money."

THE END.