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CHAPTER VIII.
A VISIT TO JOYCE.

With renewed hope I set out in the morning for Knocknacar.

It is one of the many privileges of youth that a few hours' sleep will change the darkest aspect of the entire universe to one of the rosiest tint. Since the previous evening, sleeping and waking, my mind had been framing reasons and excuses for the absence of …!—it was a perpetual grief to me that I did not even know her name. The journey to the mountain seemed longer than usual; but, even at the time, this seemed to me only natural under the circumstances.

Andy was to-day seemingly saturated or overwhelmed with a superstitious gravity. Without laying any personal basis for his remarks, but accepting as a standpoint his own remark of the previous evening concerning my having seen a fairy, he proceeded to develop his fears on the subject. I will do him the justice to say that his knowledge of folklore was immense, and that nothing but a gigantic memory for detail, cultivated to the full, or else an equally stupendous imaginitaon