While thus engaged the howl which had formerly startled him was repeated.

"Av I only knowed what ye was," muttered Barney in a serious tone, "it would be some sort o' comfort." A loud cry of a different kind here interrupted his soliloquy, and soon after the first cry was repeated louder than before.
Clenching his teeth and knitting his brows the perplexed Irishman resumed his work with a desperate resolve not to be again interrupted.

But he had miscalculated the strength of his nerves.

Albeit as brave a man as ever stepped, when his enemy was before him, Barney was, nevertheless, strongly imbued with superstitious feelings; and the conflict between his physical courage and his mental cowardice produced a species of wild exasperation, which, he often asserted, was very hard to bear.

Scarcely had he resumed his work when a bat of enormous size brushed past his nose so noiselessly that it seemed more like a phantom than a reality.