The stable of an Irish country house has always, or nearly always, a certain number of volunteer and unpaid on-hangers. At any hour of the day you might have seen in the stable-yard of Glen Druid Billy the Buck chewing a straw, Shan Finucane with his hands in his pockets, and his back against the harness room door, Moriarty, the rat-catcher from Castle Connell, colloguing, rat cage in hand, with the scullery-maid, or Micky Mooney sitting on a corn-bin, whistling and kicking his heels.

Micky was “soft.” He lived with his mother in the village of Castle Knock; and every morning early she would turn him out of her cabin, just as a person turns a donkey out to graze.

He was almost entirely self-supporting. In summer he would disappear for days amidst the hills, communing with nature and existing on roots and whortle berries and wild strawberries. If Micky sat down in a field full of rabbits, the rabbits would play about him within arm’s reach; birds knew him for their friend, cows let him milk them into his hat without protest or lamentation, and hens gave up their eggs without complaint, when raised from their nests by his deft fingers.

He was of all mad creatures the most harmless and the most natural—a really beautiful character; one of that rare type wherein lunacy is the outcome of innocence carried to an extreme. Farmers threatened to shoot him, it is true, and he had actually been fired at, and peppered with small shot when engaged in stealing eggs, but this was not done from any particular ill-will. The farmer had acted just as he acted towards the thrushes and blackbirds that pilfered his crops.

Micky was, in fact, regarded by the general public as being on a level with the birds and the rabbits, and, though no one would have hurt him for any consideration, still, had some outraged farmer shot him with a bullet in earnest, I doubt if there would have been much of an inquest.

This personage who had hunted the moon on many a summer’s night, had amongst other attributes the power of seeing fairies; nor was he in the least afraid of them. You would see him lifting up dock-leaves, and conversing with the people who lived below. He could tell half-connected tales of his doings with these folk, talking with his face half turned from you, and tracing with his thumb nail the extent of a crack in the fence he was leaning against, or the pattern of the door panel he was near; and he would tell you this and that, and the other thing, till all of a sudden his imagination would become too much for him, and with a whoop! off he would go vaulting the fence, and away across country like an india-rubber ball or a bounding kangaroo, to tell the rest of his tale to the rabbits.

Just a grain more phosphorous, just a grain more ballast, and Micky Mooney might have been a poet of the Celtic school, and led a revival and written books.

As it was, he had some of the poetic influence that makes for better things; in his company men tended to forget horses, dogs, rat-catching, whisky and girls, and turn their conversation to banshees, cluricaunes, cats with horns on their heads, and other topics of a similar nature.

When Mr Fanshawe had parted from Patsy at the front door, the latter, turning his steps to the stable-yard, had found Micky Mooney seated on the bottom of a bucket, listening with open mouth to Moriarty, the rat-catcher, who was discoursing on psychical subjects, whilst Larry Lyburn stood by the harness room door cleaning a stirrup, listening also, or seeming to listen.

All the time Moriarty had been talking, Micky Mooney had been working himself up, clapping the palms of his hands on his knees, twisting his mouth about and flinging his head from side to side. No sooner had Moriarty finished than he burst forth.

“I know a lady aal dressed in white—I know a lady aal dressed in white,” began Micky, rocking himself on the bucket and staring with his big eyes through Patsy and a hundred miles beyond—“aal dressed in white, wid a crown of gowld; and it’s ‘Micky, come afther me,’ she says, whin I meets her in the woods, ‘and it’s crocks and crates of gowld I’ll be showin’ you,’ she says. And it’s to-night I’m to meet her down in the woods be the Druids’ althar—aal dressed in white, wid a——”

“Arra! shut your head and get off the bucket,” said Mr Lyburn, who had finished cleaning the stirrup, and was now proceeding to water the horses, punctuating his remark with the toe of his boot on that part of Micky’s anatomy that was closest to the bucket.

Mr Lyburn was not a poet.

“Micky,” said Patsy, into whose arms the moon-struck one had been shot, “stop your nise and hould your bellowin’, and come afther me, for I’ve got a job for you.”

He led the seer of visions by the left hand (the right was applied to the punctuation mark) round the angle of the stable wall to a quiet spot near the potato room window.

“Hould your nise,” said Patsy, “and be listenin’ to me; I’ve got a job for you.”

“Is it a saft job?” blubbered Micky, who with a grain more brass and a grain more ballast in his composition would have shone perhaps as a Labour Member or a Labour Leader.

“Saft as a feather-bed,” replied Patsy.

Then the two began to converse together in a low tone.

Now Patsy’s hatred of Mr Boxall had roots far beyond the present, roots from the time when some men played on harps and other men painted themselves with woad.

The spirit of Puck that dwelt in the breast of Patsy had been brooding on the form of Micky Mooney all the time that Moriarty had been telling of the cluricaune. Micky’s statement about the lady in white had given the tricky spirit an idea.

Patsy did not require Mr Fanshawe’s word to know that Mr Boxall was “gone” on Miss Lestrange, and this knowledge was part parent of the idea.

“And what will you be givin’ me if I be afther doin’ as you tells me?” queried Micky, plucking at the moss in the cracks of the wall.

“I’ll give you the first silver sixpence with a hole in it I finds on a Tuesday.”

“Which Cheusday?” asked Micky cautiously, with a side look at his employer.

“I’ll be tellin’ you that to-morra. Will you be doin’ what I say?”

“I will,” said Micky.