In due course the officers of the crown came down to take possession,
and it behoved the young ladies to flit. Happily for them the
ecclesiastic I have mentioned was not quite so confident as their
father, of his winning back the magnificent patrimony of his ancestors;
and by his advice the daughters had been secured twenty pounds a year
each, under the marriage settlement of their parents, which was all that
stood between this proud house and literal destitution.

Late one evening, as some little boys from the village were returning
from a ramble through the dark and devious glen of Cappercullen, with
their pockets laden with nuts and "frahans," to their amazement and even
terror they saw a light streaming redly from the narrow window of one of
the towers overhanging the precipice among the ivy and the lofty
branches, across the glen, already dim in the shadows of the deepening
night.

"Look--look--look--'tis the Phooka's tower!" was the general cry, in the
vernacular Irish, and a universal scamper commenced.

The bed of the glen, strewn with great fragments of rock, among which
rose the tall stems of ancient trees, and overgrown with a tangled
copse, was at the best no favourable ground for a run. Now it was dark;
and, terrible work breaking through brambles and hazels and tumbling
over rocks. Little Shaeen Mull Ryan, the last of the panic rout,
screaming to his mates to wait for him--saw a whitish figure emerge from
the thicket at the base of the stone flight of steps that descended the
side of the glen, close by the castle-wall, intercepting his flight, and
a discordant male voice shrieked----