knowledge) in the bedroom of the bailiff's mother. And did the
bailiff's mother know it? you will ask. To which I answer: the
bailiff's mother did it. And, what is more, gloried in doing
it--not, observe, as an act of hostility to my relatives, but
simply as a duty that lay on her conscience.

What sort of old woman, in the name of all that is wonderful, was
this? Let her appear, and speak for herself--the wild and weird
grandmother of gentle little Mary; the Sibyl of modern times,
known, far and wide, in our part of Suffolk, as Dame Dermody.

I see her again, as I write, sitting in her son's pretty cottage
parlor, hard by the window, so that the light fell over her
shoulder while she knitted or read. A little, lean, wiry old
woman was Dame Dermody--with fierce black eyes, surmounted by
bushy white eyebrows, by a high wrinkled forehead, and by thick
white hair gathered neatly under her old-fashioned "mob-cap."
Report whispered (and whispered truly) that she had been a lady
by birth and breeding, and that she had deliberately closed her
prospects in life by marrying a man greatly her inferior in
social rank. Whatever her family might think of her marriage, she
herself never regretted it. In her estimation her husband's
memory was a sacred memory; his spirit was a guardian spirit,
watching over her, waking or sleeping, morning or night.

Holding this faith, she was in no respect influenced by those
grossly material ideas of modern growth which associate the
presence of spiritual beings with clumsy conjuring tricks and
monkey antics performed on tables and chairs. Dame Dermody's
nobler superstition formed an integral part of her religious