“You should see this view in June,” said Mrs, Kavanagh, “we are all brown and bare now.”

Brown and bare, like most other terms, are relative.  To the eye of an American this whole region now seems a sea of verdure, less clear and fresh, I can easily suppose, than it may be in the early summer, but verdure still.  And one must get into the Adirondacks, or up among the mountains of Western Virginia, to find on our Atlantic slope such trees as I have this evening seen.  One grand ilex near the house could hardly be matched in the Villa d’Este.

The house is stately and commodious, and more ancient than it appears to be,—­so many additions have been made to it at different times.  It has passed through more than one siege, and in the ’98 Mr. Kavanagh tells me the townspeople of Borris came up here and sought refuge.  There are vast caverns under the house and grounds, doubtless made by taking out from the hill the stone used in building this house, and the fortresses which stood here before it.  In these all sorts of stores were kept, and many of the people found shelter.

I need not say that there is a banshee at Borris—­though no living witness, I believe, has heard its warning wail.  But as we sat in the beautiful library, and watched the dying light of day, a lady present told us a tale more gruesome than many of those in which the “psychical” inquirers delight.  She was sitting, she said, in an upper room of an ancient mansion here in Carlow, in which she lives, when, from the lawn below, there came up to her a low, sad, shrill cry—­the croon of a woman, such as one hears from the mourners sitting among the turbaned tombstones of the hill of Eyoub at Constantinople.  It startled her, and she held her breath and listened.  She was alone, as she knew, in that part of the house, and the hall door below was unlocked, as is the fashion still in Ireland, despite all the troubles and turmoils.  Again the sound came, and this time nearer to the house.  Could it be the banshee?  Again and again it rose and died away, each time nearer and nearer.  Then, as she listened, all her nerves strung to the keenest sensibility, it came again, and now, beyond a doubt, within the hall below.

With an effort she rose from her chair, opened a door leading into a corridor running aside from the main stairway, and fled at full speed towards the wing in which she knew that she would find some of the maids.  As she sped along she heard the cry again and again far behind her, as from a creature slowly and steadily mounting the grand stairway towards the room which she had just quitted.

She found the maids, who fell into a terrible fright when she told her story and dared not budge.  So the bells were violently rung till the butler and footman appeared.  To the first she said simply, “There is a mad woman in this house—­go and find her!”

“The man looked at me,” she said, “as I spoke with a curious expression in his face as of one who thought, ’yes, there is a mad woman in the house, and she is not far to seek!’”