When I’d had a cup of tea I went back into the kitchen where the dead man was lying, and she gave me a fine new pipe off the table with a drop of spirits.

‘Stranger,’ says she, ‘would you be afeard to be alone with himself?’

‘Not a bit in the world, ma’am,’ says I; ’he that’s dead can do no hurt,’ Then she said she wanted to go over and tell the neighbours the way her husband was after dying on her, and she went out and locked the door behind her.

I smoked one pipe, and I leaned out and took another off the table.  I was smoking it with my hand on the back of my chair—­the way you are yourself this minute, God bless you—­and I looking on the dead man, when he opened his eyes as wide as myself and looked at me.

‘Don’t be afraid, stranger,’ said the dead man; ’I’m not dead at all in the world.  Come here and help me up and I’ll tell you all about it.’

Well, I went up and took the sheet off of him, and I saw that he had a fine clean shirt on his body, and fine flannel drawers.

He sat up then, and says he—­

’I’ve got a bad wife, stranger, and I let on to be dead the way I’d catch her goings on.’

Then he got two fine sticks he had to keep down his wife, and he put them at each side of his body, and he laid himself out again as if he was dead.

In half an hour his wife came back and a young man along with her.  Well, she gave him his tea, and she told him he was tired, and he would do right to go and lie down in the bedroom.

The young man went in and the woman sat down to watch by the dead man.  A while after she got up and ‘Stranger,’ says she, ’I’m going in to get the candle out of the room; I’m thinking the young man will be asleep by this time.’  She went into the bedroom, but the divil a bit of her came back.

Then the dead man got up, and he took one stick, and he gave the other to myself.  We went in and saw them lying together with her head on his arm.

The dead man hit him a blow with the stick so that the blood out of him leapt up and hit the gallery.

That is my story.

In stories of this kind he always speaks in the first person, with minute details to show that he was actually present at the scenes that are described.

At the beginning of this story he gave me a long account of what had made him be on his way to Dublin on that occasion, and told me about all the rich people he was going to see in the finest streets of the city.

A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation.  I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.

The slaty limestone has grown black with the water that is dripping on it, and wherever I turn there is the same grey obsession twining and wreathing itself among the narrow fields, and the same wail from the wind that shrieks and whistles in the loose rubble of the walls.