Alice Goodwin’s person and character must, at this stage of our narrative, be made known to our readers.  As to her person, it is only sufficient to say that she was a tall, beautiful girl, of exceeding grace and wonderful proportions.  There was, however, a softness about her appearance of constitutional delicacy that seemed to be incompatible with a strong mind, or perhaps we should rather say that was identical with an excess of feeling.  This was exhibited in the tenderness of her attachment to Agnes Hamilton, and in the agonizing grief which she experienced at her death—­a grief which had well-nigh become fatal to a girl of her fragile organization.  The predominant trait, however, in her character was timidity and a terror of a hundred trifles, which, in the generality of her sex, would occasion only indifference or laughter.  On that very morning, for instance, she had not recovered from her painful apprehensions of the thunder-storm which had occurred on the preceding night.  Of thunder, but especially of lightning, she was afraid even to pusillanimity; indeed so much so, that on such occurrences she would bind her eyes, fly down stairs, and take refuge in the cellar until the I hurly-burly in the clouds was over.  This, however, was not so much to be wondered at by those who live in our present and more enlightened days; as our readers will admit when they are told that the period of our narrative is in the reign of that truly religious monarch, Charles the Second, who, conscious of his inward and invisible grace, was known to exhaust himself so liberally of his virtue, when touching for the Evil, that there was very little of it left to regulate that of his own private life.  In those days Ireland was a mass of social superstitions, and a vast number of cures in a variety of diseases were said to be performed by witches, wizards, fairy-men, fairy-women, and a thousand other impostors, who, supported by the gross ignorance of the people, carried that which was first commenced in fraud and cunning into a self-delusion, which, in process of time, led them to become dupes to their own impostures.  It is not to be wondered at, then, that Alice Goodwin, a young creature of a warm imagination and extraordinary constitutional timidity, should feel the full force of the superstitions which swarmed around her, and impregnated her fancy so strongly that it teemed with an unhealthy creation, which frequently rendered her existence painful by a morbid apprehension of wicked and supernatural influences.  In other respects she was artlessness itself, could never understand what falsehood meant, and, as to truth, her unspotted mind was transparent as a sunbeam.  Our readers are not to understand, however, that though apparently flexible and ductile, she possessed no power of moral resistance.  So very far from that, her disposition, wherever she thought herself right, was not only firm and unbending, but sometimes rose almost to obstinacy.  This, however, never appeared, unless she considered