“Indeed, I can scarcely tell you—­sich groans, an’ wild shoutins, an’ shrieks, man’s ears never hard in this world, I think; there I hard them as I was comin’ past the trees, an’ afther I passed them; an’ when I left them far behind me, I could hear, every now and then, a wild shriek that made my blood run cowld.  But there was still worse as I crossed the Black Park; something got up into the air out o’ the rushes before me, an’ went off wid a noise not unlike what Jerry Hamilton of the Band makes when he rubs his middle finger up against the tamborine.”

“Heaven be about us!” she exclaimed, once more crossing herself, and uttering a short prayer for protection from evil; “but tell me, how did you know it was his Box, and how did you find it out?”

“By the letters P. M., and the broken hinge,” he replied.

“Blessed be the name of God!” she exclaimed again—­“He won’t let the murdher lie, that’s clear.  But what I want to know is, how did your goin’ to the Grey Stone bring you to the knowledge of the box?”

He then gave her a more detailed account of his conversation with Sarah M’Gowan, and the singular turn which it chanced to take towards the subject of the handkerchief, in the first instance; but when the coincidence of the letters were mentioned, together with Sarah’s admission that she had the box in her possession, she clasped her hands, and looking upwards exclaimed—­

“Blessed be the name of the Almighty for that!  Oh, I feel there is no doubt now the hand of God is in it, an’ we’ll come at the murdher or the murdherers yet.”

“I hope so,” he replied; “but I’m lost Wid wet an’ cowld; so in the meantime I’ll be off home, an’ to my bed.  I had something to say to you about another matther, but I’ll wait till mornin’; dear knows, I’m in no condition to spake about anything else to-night.  This is a snug little cabin; but, plaise God, in the coorse of a week or so, I’ll have you more comfortable than you are.  If my own throuble was over me, I wouldn’t stop long in the neighborhood; but as the hand of God seems to be in this business, I can’t think of goin’ till it’s cleared up, as cleared up it will be, I have no doubt, an’ can have none, afther what has happened this awful night.”

Hanlon’s situation with his master was one with which many of our readers are, no doubt, well acquainted.  He himself was a clever, active, ingenious fellow, who could, as they say in the country, put a hand to anything, and make himself useful in a great variety of employments.  He had in the spring of that year, been engaged as a common laborer by Dick o’ the Grange, in which capacity he soon attracted his employer’s notice, by his extraordinary skill in almost everything pertaining to that worthy gentleman’s establishment.  It is true he was a stranger in the country, of whom nobody knew anything—­for there appeared to be some mystery about him; but as Dick cared little of either his place of birth or