Your Reverence,—Hopin’ this finds you in good health, thanks be to God. Plase your Reverence, the Quarest that ever you witnessed has got clamberin’ inside on the wall. I dunno what at all to say to it; never the like of it I seen. But the creelin’ of it and the crawlin’ of it would terrify you. Makin’ offers now and agin it does be to smoother the Houly Virgin, but sure I’d be long sorry to let it do that bad thrick, after all the goodness of your Reverence. And I was thinkin’ this long while your Reverence might be maybe steppin’ our way yourself some day, for creepin’ over all before it it is every minute of time. Such a terrible quare thing I never heard tell of, and the sorra another sowl except meself have I about the place.

Your obedient,
Mary Martin.

This letter caused Father Gilmore considerable uneasiness, for it filled him with misgivings about the mental condition of the writer. Her account of “the Quarest that ever you witnessed,” sounded, he feared, painfully like the hallucinations of a mind distempered by over long solitude. “Indeed it’s no way for the poor ould body to be left, if one could help it,” he mused. Even in his meditations I am sure that Father Gilmore must have used his soft southern brogue—“I’ve thought many a time it was enough to drive her demented—and now there’s some quare sort of delusion she’s taken into her head, that’s plain, goodness pity her. I’d have done right to go see after her before this, as I was intendin’, only somethin’ always happened to hinder me.”

He was determined now against any further delay, and he set out that very afternoon to visit his afflicted parishioner. The expedition was rather formidable to him, as he had a natural shrinking from stormy scenes, and he fully expected that he would find poor little Mrs. Martin if not downright “raving in no small madness,” at least labouring under some frightful delusion, in the shape, apparently, of a hideous monster infesting her abode. This prospect made him so nervously apprehensive that he was glad to fall in with a small youth, one Paddy Greer, who seemed inclined to accompany him upon his walk. All the way along, between the greening hedges of the lane, he remonstrated with himself for letting the gossoon share unwittingly in such an errand, yet he could not make up his mind to dismiss Paddy, or to feel otherwise than relieved by the continued bare-foot patter at his side.

But his relief was far greater when on reaching the cabin he saw its mistress in her little green plaid shawl and black skirt and white cap, standing at her door among the long westering sunbeams, without any signs of excitement or aberration in her demeanour; and his mind grew quite easy when he ascertained that the creeping thing indoors was no horrible phantasmal reptile, but only a twining tapestry of bright leaves and sprays, which trailed a fold of Spring’s garment into the dark-cornered room. Still, satisfactorily as the matter had been cleared up from his former point of view, he could suggest nothing to lessen Mrs. Martin’s wonder at the mysterious appearance of the creeper on her wall. His acquaintance with such things was slight, and he merely had an impression that the fashion of the delicately luxuriant foliage seemed unfamiliar to him. So he promised to return on the morrow with the national school-teacher, who was reputed a knowledgeable man about plants. Before that came to pass, however, Mrs. Martin had another visitor. For little Paddy ran home to his mother with the news that “the Widdy Martin was after showin’ his Reverence a green affair she had stuck up on her wall, and that he said it was rale super-exthrornary altogether, and he’d get Mr. Colclough to it.” At that hearing the curiosity of Paddy’s mother incited her to call without losing a moment at Mrs. Martin’s house, where she inspected the marvellous growth as well as the falling twilight permitted, and admired the gracious-looking little image quite to its owner’s content. Thus Mrs. Martin enjoyed a sociable cup of tea, and an enthralling gossip, which sent her to bed that evening in much better spirits than usual.

Next morning arrived Father Gilmore with the schoolmaster, who was unable to identify the strange creeper, but called its appearance a phenomenon, which seemed somehow to take the edge off the admission of ignorance. His failure only served to heighten a sense of awe and wonderment among several of the neighbours, who also looked in on her during the day. For the village rapidly filled with reports of “the big wrathe of green laves that was windin’ itself round the Widdy Martin’s grand image of the Blessed Virgin, and it inside on her wall, mind you, where ’twould be a surprisin’ thing to see e’er a plant settlin’