She had no sooner disappeared than the prophet, having closed and bolted the door, walked backwards and forwards, in a moody and unsettled manner.

“What,” he exclaimed to himself, “can be the matther with that woman, that made her look at me in sich a way a while agone?  I could not mistake her eye.  She surely knows more than I thought, or she would not fix her eye into mine as she did.  Could there be anything in that dhrame about Dalton an’ my coffin?  Hut! that’s nonsense.  Many a dhrame I had that went for nothin’.  The only thing she could stumble on is the Box, an’ I don’t think she would be likely to find that out, unless she went to throw down the house; but, anyhow, it’s no harm to thry.”  He immediately mounted the old table, and, stretching up, searched the crevice in the wall where it had been, but, we need not add, in vain.  He then came down again, in a state of dreadful alarm, and made a general search for it in every hole and corner visible, after, which his agitation became wild and excessive.

“She has got it!” he exclaimed—­“she has stumbled on it, aided by the devil’—­an’ may she soon be in his clutches!—­and it’s the only thing I’m afeard of!  But then,” he added, pausing, and getting somewhat cool—­“does she know it might be brought against me, or who owned it?  I don’t think she does; but still, where can it be, and what could she mane by Providence trackin’ me out?—­an’ why did she look as if she:  knew something?  Then that dhrame I can’t get it out o’ my head this whole day—­and the terrible one I had last night, too!  But that last is aisily ’counted for.  As it is, I must only wait, and watch her; and if I find she can be dangerous, why—­it’ll be worse for her—­that’s all!”

He then threw himself on the wretched bed, and, despite of his tumultuous reflections, soon fell asleep.

CHAPTER VI. —­ A Rustic Miser and His Establishment

There is to be found in Ireland, and, we presume, in all other countries, a class of hardened wretches, who look forward to a period of dearth as to one of great gain and advantage, and who contrive, by exercising the most heartless and diabolical principles, to make the sickness, famine, and general desolation which scourge their fellow-creatures, so many sources of successful extortion and rapacity, and consequently of gain to themselves.  These are Country Misers or Money-lenders, who are remarkable for keeping meal until the arrival of what is termed a hard year, or a dear summer, when they sell it out at an enormous or usurious prices, and who, at all times, and under all circumstances, dispose of it only at terms dictated by their own griping spirit and the crying necessity of the unhappy purchasers.

The houses and places of such persons are always remarkable for a character in their owners of hard and severe saving, which at a first glance has the appearance of that rare virtue in our country, called frugality—­a virtue which, upon a closer inspection, is found to be nothing with them but selfishness, sharpened up into the most unscrupulous avarice and penury.