Argosy, September 1955 — page 87: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

85 Music for the Wicked Countess by Joan Athen R. BOND was a young man who had just arrived in a small i village to take up the position of schoolmaster there. The village was called Castle Kerrig, but the curious thing about it was that there was no castle and never had been one. Round three-quarters of its circumference was a large wood which came almost to the door of the schoolmaster’s little house, and beyond that the wild hills and bog stretched for miles. There were only ten children needing to be taught; it hardly seemed worth having a school there at all, but without it they would have had to travel forty miles by bus every day, and a schoolmaster was far cheaper than all that petrol, so Mr. Bond was given the job. It suited him very well, as he did not have to waste too much time in teaching and had plenty left for his collections of birds’ eggs, moths, butterflies, fossils, stones, bones, lizards, and flowers, and his piano-playing. There was a tinny old piano in the school, and when he and the children were bored by lessons, he would play tunes and songs to them for hours at a time while they listened in a dream. One day the eldest of the children, Norah, said to him: “Faith, ‘tis the way your Honour should be playing to the Countess up at the Castle for the wonder and beauty of your melodies does be out of this world entirely.”’ “The Castle?’”’ said Mr. Bond curiously. ‘‘ What castle is that? ‘There’s no castle near here, is there? ”’ ‘“ Ah, sure, ’tis the castle in the forest I mean. The Wicked Countess would weep the eyes out of her head to hear the tunes you do be playing.” ‘* Castle in the forest?” The schoolmaster was more and more puzzled. “ But there’s no castle in the forest—at least, it’s not marked on the 2$-inch ordnance survey.” comiclbooks.conn