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"A-whish, a-whish!" muttered Dame Darkmans, "to spake so to the poor; but the rats never lie, the bonny things!" Aram threw himself into his chair, and remained for some moments absorbed in a revery, which did not bear the aspect of gloom.
"Hush, hush, Goody Darkmans; he may hear o' ye!" said the second gossip, who, having now done all that remained to do, had seated herself down by the window, while the more ominous crone, leaning over Aram's oak chair, uttered from thence her sibyl bodings.
"A-whish, a-whish!" muttered Dame Darkmans, "to spake so to the poor; but the rats never lie, the bonny things!" Aram threw himself into his chair, and remained for some moments absorbed in a revery, which did not bear the aspect of gloom.
And so I stood aside by the tree, an' I laughed to look on the ugsome creturs as they swept close by me, tramp, tramp! and they never heeded me a jot; but some on 'em looked aslant at me with their glittering eyes, and showed their white teeth, as if they grinned, and were saying to me, 'Ha, ha! Goody Darkmans, the house that we leave is a falling house, for the devil will have his own."
"Ho, ho!" muttered the old hag whose predictions in the morning had been so ominous, "ho, ho! you'll believe Goody Darkmans another time! Providence respects the sayings of the ould. 'T was not for nothing the rats grinned at me last night. But let's in and have a warm glass. He, he! there will be all the strong liquors for us now; the Lord is merciful to the poor!"
But I knows what I knows, and I minds what I seed last night." "Why, what did you see last night?" asked the listener, with a trembling voice; for Plother Darkmans was a great teller of ghost and witch tales, and a certain ineffable awe of her dark gypsy features and malignant words had circulated pretty largely throughout the village.
Goody Darkmans," said the second gossip. "They be much prettier and finer, to my mind; and so said Miss Nelly when she plucked them last night and sent me down with them. They says there is not a blade o' grass that the master does not know. He must be a good man to love the things of the field so." "Ho!" said Dame Darkmans, "ho!
'He had his last yesterday, said another gruffly; 'and now old Meg may pray for his last fair wind, as she's often done before. 'I'll pray for nane o' him, said Meg, 'nor for you neither, you randy dog. The times are sair altered since I was a kinchen-mort. Men were men then, and fought other in the open field, and there was nae milling in the darkmans.
"Ho, ho!" muttered the old hag whose predictions in the morning had been so ominous, "ho, ho! you'll believe Goody Darkmans another time! Providence respects the sayings of the ould. 'T was not for nothing the rats grinned at me last night. But let's in and have a warm glass. He, he! there will be all the strong liquors for us now; the Lord is merciful to the poor!"
"No," replied Mother Darkmans, "I seed him go out an hour agone, when the sun was just on the rise; and I said, when I seed him stroam into the wood yonder, and the ould leaves splashed in the damp under his feet, and his hat was aboon his brows, and his lips went so, I said, says I, 't is not the man that will make a hearth bright that would walk thus on his marriage day.
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