Where the Atlantic
meets the Land

BY CALDWELL LIPSETT

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROS, 1896
LONDON: JOHN LANE, VIGO ST.

Copyright, 1896,
BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.

All Rights Reserved.

University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

DEDICATED
TO
MY DEAREST MOTHER.

CONTENTS

[THE UNFORGIVEN SIN]
[THE LEGEND OF BARNESMORE GAP]
[MORE CRUEL THAN THE GRAVE]
[THE AIR-GUN]
[THE GIANTS' CASTLE]
[THE NIGHT OF THE HOME RULE BILL]
[A BORDER WAR]
[A NIGHTMARE CLIMB]
[A PEASANT TRAGEDY]
[ORANGE AND GREEN]
[ANDY KERRIGAN'S HONEYMOON]
[A PAUPER'S BURIAL]
[THE GAUGER'S LEP]
[THE GILLIE]
['THE FINAL FLICKER']
[A DIVIDED FAITH]

THE UNFORGIVEN SIN

Bella Sweeny and Terry Gallagher had a holiday, and were spending it upon the rocks at Kilcross. He was a groom and she was a maid at 'the big house,' some miles inland, and this was her first visit to the place. He had been there several times before, and was doing the honors of the scenery. They had been 'coortin'' for some time, and he sat with his arm round her waist, in silence for the most part, punctuated by occasional references to the local names for heads of the landscape: he kept severely to facts, with the practical mind of the peasant class from which he sprang.

The point at which they found themselves was the innermost end of the long line of black-faced cliffs, where the rocky strata suddenly ceased and gave way to the sandy lowlands. The rock upon which they were seated was a single flat slab, which extended a hundred yards into the sea, forming a natural breakwater for the little cove behind them. To their right there stretched inland a couple of miles of yellow glistening strand, which merged gradually in the tufted bent-grass and rounded hillocks of the dunes which sloped to meet it at high-water mark. At the furthest point of sight in this direction the rocky strata cropped up again in the shape of an immense reef which stretched out half a mile into the sea, and now at low tide lay like a gigantic alligator on the surface of the water. When the tide was full its jagged points were completely covered, and only a thread of surf was left to warn the fisherman of its hidden dangers.

'This rock that we're a-settin' on,' said Terry, 'is called the Yeough Flag, from the fishes they catch off ov it: an' yon big wan out there is Carrick Fad: an' that wan is the Connaughtman's Rock, where a boat's load from Connaught was wrecked wan winter's night an' all han's lost.' He pointed as he spoke to a spot in the sea beside them, where a mat of long golden brown wrack floated flush with the surface, and the swell broke gently with a soft gurgle and a few air-bubbles.

Behind them and to their left the cliffs rose two hundred feet in the air as they soared seaward. The first fifty feet were formed of crumbling slate, above that came a layer of gravelly soil which was scooped out in regular scollops by land slips and seamed and scarred by winter torrents. At the extreme point of the bay the rock was hollowed out beneath by the constant dash of the surf, and the bank sloping more gently overhead was clothed with the long rank grass which has never known a scythe, coarse like the hairs of a horse's tail. The diamond-shaped point where the two met cut sharply into the sky-line. Beyond that point the cliffs became one solid wall of beetling rock.

The space between the base of the cliffs and the edge of the water in the cove was covered with boulders piled pell-mell on top of each other: they were of every size, from a trunk to a small house, and of every shape: here a square-shaped block lay like a stranded whale and there a thin slab was tilted edgeways towards the sky. The débris of the Atlantic flung by winter storms here upon its outermost verge, looking like the deposit of some huge primeval glacier.

'Yon's the Cormorants' Rock,' interjected Terry, alluding to the pointed headland, 'an' there's a cormorant,' as he pointed to a black speck winging its way with steady flight low down across the water.

Then he continued with a sudden change of subject, blurting out the words as though they blistered his tongue, 'Bella, darlin', don't you think we've waited long enough? I've got enough to marry on now. When shall we be called?' He had been nerving himself for this effort all the morning, and gave a great sigh of relief now that it was over.

The girl sat silent for a minute, considering the question thoughtfully, and then replied quite calmly, 'Av ye're of the wan min' this day six months, come an' tell me, an' I'll let you give notice to the praste,' and she lifted her mouth for the official stamp to the agreement.

For some time after that they sat in awkward silence. Both of them tried to think of a remark, but neither could find one. The growing uneasiness of an anti-climax rose between them. His arm relaxed round her waist, he shuffled his feet restlessly, and at last jumping up, exclaimed:

'Let's go an' catch some s'rimps.'

'What's that?' asked Bella.

'Little wee fishes that sweem about in the pools over there.'

'D'ye think ye can catch them?' she inquired doubtfully, but she rose and accompanied him to the rock-strewn side of the cove opposite, which proved on closer view to be dotted with small pools left by the retreating tide. In these a small variety of prawns disported themselves, and were dislodged from behind stones and underneath pieces of seaweed by Terry's intrusive ash-plant. He knelt down and tried to catch some of them in his hands, but they retreated warily in front of him with outstretched feelers, and when apparently enclosed upon all sides, darted with a sudden spring out of reach, and retired backwards under the impenetrable fastness of an overhanging rock.

'These yellah wans is rock s'rimps,' he explained, 'sand s'rimps is gray.'

Bella was greatly delighted with the queer aspect of the creatures, their translucent bodies, the large heads with their serrated horn and protruding eyes, and the long flexible 'whiskers,' and begged her lover to catch one for her to see closer.

Presently they came to a large pool above the reach of any but the highest tides. The water here softened by the rain was only brackish: the stones were clothed with long green seaweed, and those underneath the stagnant surface were coated with a brownish slime. The shrimps imprisoned by a chance migration in this uncongenial spot were more sluggish than their tidal neighbors, and one allowed himself to be caught, and in a moment lay kicking on Bella's outstretched palm.

When she had looked her fill of admiration Terry put it for greater safekeeping in his mouth: at this indignity the shrimp mustered all its activity for a final effort and jumped, tail first, down the young man's throat. Terry commenced to cough and splutter and went purple in the face, and Bella in alarm hit him a violent slap between the shoulders.

Her action had the desired effect, for it dislodged the shrimp from its dangerous resting-place, but a blow from her vigorous young arm was no light matter, and Terry lurched forward onto a tuft of the green seaweed which slid away beneath his feet: to recover his balance he stepped hastily onto a brown stone in the centre of the pool, but it proved yet more treacherous than the green: his heels flew from beneath him, leaving long nail marks on the greasy surface of the stone, and he fell flat on his back in the shallow water.

He lay still for a moment, stunned by the surprise, then rose to his feet, his clothes dripping streams of water and his hair matted with the long green seaweed, and found Bella shaking with a great spasm of laughter. Her large serious gray eyes were completely closed, and her pretty face contorted with the vulgarity of excessive merriment. He grinned sheepishly and said,—

'Them stones is powerful slippy.'

But she only laughed the more, till she became so weak that she collapsed onto the nearest rock, the tears streaming down her cheeks. At the sight a vague resentment gradually crept over Terry's docile Irish nature: he felt dimly that no woman would laugh like that at a man whom she really loved, and the change worked in the appearance of her features annoyed him. He exclaimed sharply,—

'Ah, quit now. Much you care av I'd been choked.'

Bella looked up, surprised at the unusual tone, but stopped laughing at once and replied meekly:

'Niver heed me, Terry, dear, I didn't offer to vex yous.'

Peace was at once restored, and they began to scramble together hand in hand over the uneven rocks towards the sea. All that was now left of it in the bay was a single streak of silver, which lay pent and sleeping in its narrow channel, that had been worn deep in the solid rock by the current of ages. Its bottom was piled with serpentine coils of wrack, sea-ferns in all their varied beauty of form and color, and 'slock-morrows' with their thick hairy stems and long slimy leaves: some of them still gripped with their roots the stones which they had torn with them beneath the stress of storm from their ocean bed. Beneath the misty film of the breeze upon the surface the whole mass writhed with each recurring pulse of the unresting sea like a living welter of sea-snakes.

'That's the wrack-hole,' announced Terry the well informed.

'Let me see,' said Bella, clinging timidly to his arm as she crept nearer and peered into its depths, with a shrinking awe as though at some half-human monster that battened upon mankind. For its name was known through the countryside as the bane of widows and childless mothers: at half-tide the waves poured over the surrounding rocks and swept seaward through this passage in a race that the strongest swimmer could not stem, and which had hurried many a venturesome beginner to his doom.

But many a time in the after days Terry looked back upon that moment, when the girl beside him clung to his hand and confided in his protection, as the happiest in his life. Such trifles serve to uplift or cast down a lover.

Bella shuddered and drew back, and they passed onwards towards the Cormorants' Rock. The boulders ceased and they came out upon the flat bed-rock. Women were there gathering sloak and dillusk, the spinach and edible moss of the sea: the constant passage of generations of naked feet had worn a track smooth and free from barnacles over the flaky slate: a row of footholds carved by the same agency led round the projecting corner, which was whitened down to high-water mark by the droppings of the cormorants from their nightly roosting-places above. As they looked, a couple of the women attempted the passage. The day was calm, but the Atlantic is never still, and rising out of nothing 'the shining sensitive silver of the sea' broke with a dull murmur upon this outpost of the cliff. The women waited until a wave larger than usual had passed, and began their journey, but the treacherous sea regathered itself and was upon them in the midst, dashing up beneath their petticoats. They flattened their bodies desperately against the rock, and twined their fingers in the short button-wrack that grew at high-water mark: their skirts floated wide upon the surface of the swell, but its force did not avail to pluck them from their hold. It retreated baffled, and the two bedraggled figures scrambled round the corner and were lost to view.

'Holy Mother, but it's a mercy they weren't lost,' cried Bella.

'Ay,' replied Terry, 'the tide must have turned. It's top spring the day, so it must be afther twelve. Troth, it's near hand wan,' he continued, cocking his eye at the sun. It wasn't often that he had the opportunity to unload such a store of information, and he made the best of the occasion.

Bella regarded him with wide eyes as he displayed this unsuspected hoard of marine lore, and treated him with unwonted respect for the remainder of the day.

'It's time we was goin' home, or I'll be late for the milkin',' she said, and they began to retrace their steps.

When they got off the boulders once more onto the sandy floor of the little bay, the tide was coming in with long pauses and feigned retreats followed by sudden rushes. In the midst of its path stood an isolated altar of four large stones just islanded by a tongue of bubbling wavelets.

'I mind when I was a wee fellah,' said Terry, 'we used to see which of us could stay on them foor stones longest without gettin' wet.'

'Let's try,' cried Bella, gleefully.

They jumped onto the stones and off again in eager rivalry for several minutes. Often there would be a wide gulf between them and the shore, and then the sea would retreat and leave it bare again. But at last they stopped too long: the tide flowed in with a sudden rush and never came back again near their island.

'What will we do?' cried Bella in dismay, when she realized they were altogether surrounded.

'Niver fear,' replied Terry, 'I can carry yous,' and he took off his shoes and stockings well pleased at the success of his stratagem.

He took her up carefully in his arms, like a baby, and carried her ashore: she lay quite still, without a blush or tremor, as he strained her to his breast, and when he kissed her before setting her upon her feet her lips met his frankly but did not return their pressure. Terry knew little of the ways of women, but his instinct told him that either more or less warmth would have been a better augury. He felt 'a bit dashed,' as he himself would say, at her tolerant attitude.

Then he went and put the horse into the cart, which he had borrowed for the day from a neighbor. Bella sat in the bottom upon a lining of hay, and her teeth rattled in her head at every jolt of the springless vehicle behind the rough-trotting plough-horse. Terry sat on the shaft in front, swinging his legs, and got a crick in his neck turning his head to admire her dishevelled hair and the brown shadows beneath her Irish eyes, 'rubbed in with a dirty finger,' as the saying goes.

For the next six months Terry lived upon the memory of that day. It formed the high-water mark of his influence with the girl whom he grew to love the more she disregarded him: for a man's love feeds upon starvation. Upon that day the unfamiliarity of her surroundings had allowed him to appear to an advantage he had never enjoyed before or since. Up to that point in their intercourse she had always been the stronger, and now a new element appeared to have entered her life and ousted him from it. Nothing that he could say or do could touch her interest any longer: he had an impalpable feeling that every day he was more outside of her, more in the cold. When they met about their daily work upon the farm, she merely tolerated his presence as she would tolerate a necessary article of furniture.

Terry racked his brains vainly to guess what cause of offence he had given her, or to imagine a reason for this change in her attitude: but he could find none. It was true that of late 'the misthress' had taken Bella to wait upon herself exclusively with the exception of her work in the dairy: and some of the other maids threw out hints about 'them as is took notice of soon becomes overly cocked up:' but Terry knew her too well to suspect her of such littleness: he rather put down her evident weariness of him to some failure in himself, he was not good enough for her.

One day in especial this came home to him. She had driven into the neighboring town of Lisnamore with her mistress, Mrs. Fenwick, to accompany that lady upon a shopping excursion. He was passing down the opposite side of the street, and saw her sitting upon the side of the car talking with a heightened color to 'the young Masther,' Mrs. Fenwick's eldest son, who was home from Trinity for the vacation, and who was standing with one hand resting carelessly upon the cushion beside her. She did not even notice Terry, and he passed on with a desolate feeling at his heart, nearer to tears than he had been since his babyhood.

On the afternoon that the six months expired he went to find her in the byre at milking time. He had questioned himself long and anxiously if it was worth while going at all, but came to the conclusion 'best give her her chanst.' So though he had already seen her several times that day, he went to his room over the coach-house and put on his Sunday clothes, the clothes he had worn that day upon the rocks at Kilcross, and a flaming scarlet tie that he had bought for this occasion a week afterwards. And in this gala dress with his heart in his boots he went to meet his fate.

He stood with a straw in his mouth leaning against the doorpost of the byre, and never said a word from the moment when the first thin thread of milk spirted into the empty tin porringer with a tinkling sound till the last porringer was emptied into the foaming pails. He walked beside her in solemn silence while she carried the pails to the dairy: but though his heart yearned over her he did not offer to help her: the men of the country do not relieve the women of their burdens. And still in silence he watched her pour the fresh milk through the strainer into the large earthenware crocks to 'set' for cream.

At last Bella herself broke the silence. 'Well, Terry, are ye ov the wan min' yet?' she asked abruptly in a mocking voice.

'I am,' replied Terry heavily, 'av ye'll take me.'

Bella flushed and looked down, then she continued suddenly in a hard, even tone:

'I'll not marry yous here. But av ye like to come wid me to Enniskilling, I'll marry yous to-morrow.'

At this unlooked for speech the blood surged over Terry's face and neck in a deep red flood. 'Ov coorse I'll come and welcome,' he answered hastily: the opportunity was too good to miss, there would be time to think later on.

But the moment that she had obtained her terms thus easily a swift remorse seized upon the girl, and she cried:

'No, no, I won't go. It's not fair on yous. I don't luv yous enough.'

But the young man replied firmly with a deep note of exaltation in his voice:

'I have yer promus, and I won't give it yous back. I know that I haven't yer luv yet, but I'm not afeard but I can win it, av ye give me the chanst. I'd come av I had to wade through a fiel' ov fire.'

Suddenly the girl burst into a flood of tears, and bowing her head, seized his hand and kissed it, murmuring through her sobs, 'You are too good for me, Terry, too good for me.'

'Too good,' he repeated wonderingly, resting his hand uncouthly upon her bright brown hair. 'Is it me? Why, I'm not fit for yous to wipe yer little feet upon.'

The next evening at the twilight hour there was a small gathering at the forge, which was perched upon the side of a hill upon the main road near the centre of the parish: it stood a little back in a square open space with its staring whitewashed walls, thatched roofs, and large unglazed window-openings. It was the district club, the meeting-place for the scattered cottagers of the countryside, the centre whence gossip radiated. The blacksmith was just finishing the last of a set of horseshoes, and the roar of the bellows formed a monotonous undertone to the fitful conversation. Patsey Brannigan, the patriarch of the place, was sitting on his usual creel, with his short clay pipe between his teeth, watching the sparks fly from the glowing metal with unblinking eyes. A group of half a dozen young men lounged about the doorway, propping the doorposts upon either side. Mac Ilrea dropped the completed shoe into the trough of water with a spluttering hiss, and said in a tone of relief, 'There, that's done, glory be.'

At that moment Hannah Sweeny, Bella's cousin, came up, carrying a couple of pails of water from the well, and put them down in front of the doorway as she asked the company at large:

'Have ye heard tell what our Bella's afther doin'?'

'De'il a hate', said Owen Gallagher, 'shpake away.'

'She's aff to Enniskilling with Terry Gallagher:' she was a red-headed girl with bare feet, and she stood with her hands on her hips as she watched the effect of her announcement.

'What, that gomeral,' exclaimed Owen in disgust. He was a connection of Terry's in a place where there are whole groups of families of the same name, and the blood is inextricably mingled; but the relationship was only close enough to throw into relief the uneasy rivalry with which he regarded his cousin.

'Yis, they wint be the mornin' thrain. An' what's more,' she continued, doling out her news with the deliberation that comes of a momentary importance, 'they do be sayin' that oul' Peggy's gone afther them be the evenin' thrain.'

'That's as it shud be,' said Mrs. Mac, coming forward from the inner room, 'her mother has a right to see they're married proper.'

'What she cud see in yon suckin' calf, bets ahl,' continued Owen, harping upon his one note.

'Troth thin it's him that might do betther than thrapesin' about the counthry afther yon flibbertigibbet,' said Hannah with heat.

'Ay,' replied her antagonist with a leer, 'yous had ahlways a saft spot for him yersilf, I doubt,' and the girl retired defeated from the contest.

'What bets me,' said Mac slowly, 'is what ud ail them not to be married quiet at home. Who's hinderin' them?'

A sigh passed through the group as they settled themselves down to consider this new aspect of the case.

Suddenly old Patsey took the pipe out of his mouth and spat upon the ground, then he leant forward deliberately while every one waited, took a red-hot turf coal from the fire with his naked fingers and sucked at it with his dhudeen, gradually cramming it down into the bowl until it had all crumbled away, then he said:

'Andy Sweeny's dahter cudn't do other.'

'Ah,' said one of the younger men interrogatively.

'He was a wild shpark, he was,' continued Patsey, meditatively, 'I doubt it's the father's blood she has in her. He was terrible fond of the gurls, so he was,' and the old man shook his head over a failing that had never appealed to him, and did not belong to his race.

'What call had oul' Peggy to take the likes ov yon?' asked Mac.

'Ahl ov us is young wanst in our lives,' replied Patsey sententiously, 'and he was a terrible han'some man. He was not from these parts, a packman from down Longford way: an' Masther Johnnie, what's home from school—'

'College,' corrected Hannah, but nobody paid any heed to her.

'—he has a power ov book-larnin', and he did be sayin' to me the other day that Sweeny come ov Spanish blood that they have in them down yonder from the times the Armady was wrecked on the shores of Longford—'

'Sorra but Longford isn't near the say,' interrupted Hannah, 'troth I larnt that meself in the National School—'

'Ah, will ye hould yer whisht, Hannah Gallagher, ye long-tongued divil ye,' cried Mrs. Mac. 'Ye're too cliver be half wid yer jography, so yous are.'

Hannah subsided, and Patsey continued, serenely impervious to criticism.

'Anyways she married him, and she only regretted it wanst, and that was ivery day ov her life afther. He was killed in a fight at a fair over a gurl, and that was the ind ov him, pace to his ashes.'

'Ye wudn't think oul' Peggy was that soort now,' persisted Mac; 'she lukes as could as yon hearthstone,' pointing as he spoke to the heap of gray ashes that had lately been a fire.

But one of the young men leant upon the handle of the bellows, and in a moment they leapt into a fierce white flame.

'Ay,' said Patsey, pointing the stem of his clay at the quickly-blackening cinders, 'yon's a betther answer nor any I cud give in a month ov Sundays.'

The following morning the rumor ran through the whole townland like fire through flax that Bella had returned with her mother unaccompanied by Terry, and unmarried.

Many were the conjectures that evening at the forge as to the meaning of this new move. Terry had been sounded on the subject, and told all he knew. He went with Bella to Enniskillen, and gave notice to the priest. Then they were overtaken by old Peggy, who spoke to her daughter privately for a few minutes. Bella came out from the conversation and said she had changed her mind and would not marry him after all. He raved and stormed, but all to no purpose: Bella was indifferent and her mother sphinx-like, he could get nothing further out of either, and he could not marry the girl in spite of herself. She went away and slept with her mother that night, and returned home by the first train in the morning. He could no nothing but follow her by the second.—Those were the facts, but as to the explanation of them he was entirely at a loss.

While they were still discussing this strange story, Terry himself passed the forge, switching moodily with his ash-plant at the 'boughaleen bwees,' the yellow rag-weed, that fringed the roadside.

When he came opposite the group at the doorway his cousin Owen called out to him jeeringly, 'Well, Terry, so yous are home again wid wan han' as long as the other. Didn't oul' Peggy think yous good enough for her dahter?'

Terry halted and looked up at them with a mild, wistful expression in his oxlike eyes, the look of a wounded animal, and said simply, 'Shure I'm not good enough for her.'

Somehow the laugh that had begun died away immediately, and Owen withdrew behind his companions, and began to light his pipe in a dark corner of the forge. His pipe was already alight. But Terry went upon his way pondering these, the first rough words of outside criticism that had fallen upon his ears. His mind was slow to move, and needed a jog from another hand to start it: but once stirred it moved deeply, and entertaining few ideas it was all the more tenacious of those which did manage to effect an entrance. His fancy for Bella, at first a young man's liking for a maid, had been fanned by opposition till now it had become a slow fire consuming his marrow. He thought of her all day, and in the night he lay awake biting his pillows, to prevent himself crying aloud for very loneliness of spirit. Bella remained at home with her mother, and he never saw her now, but her picture was too indelibly printed on his imagination for propinquity to add to her charms: absence but idealized them. He went about his work brooding eternally over his loss, and for the first time no one ventured to intrude upon his solitude. They laughed at him behind his back for a soft who had been jilted at the altar: but he had acquired a fresh dignity, which saved him from open ridicule or unsolicited advances. In those days when his trouble lay heavy upon him he shunned human creatures and found companionship only in the society of his horses. Their large calm soothed his fevered nerves. They grew to know his step, and whinnied when they heard him coming: and they would caress him with their tender muzzles as he rubbed them down with the soft hissing noise that they loved. For in sorrow animals are our most comforting companions: they are so silent and placid and self-contained, 'not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.'

But at the end of six months a fresh shock convulsed the neighborhood. As on the first occasion it was Hannah that brought the news to the forge, but this time it was the morning, and there was nobody there but the blacksmith and his wife.

'Have ye heerd tell what's come to oul' Peggy's Bella,' she asked, standing breathlessly in the doorway, and added without waiting for a reply, 'she had a child last night.'

'You don't tell me,' cried Mrs. Mac in amazement.

'They had the oul' wumman from the Poorhouse there ahl night, an' I just seen the dishpensary docther lave the dure this minute wid me own two eyes.'

'An' her such a soft-spoken crathur,' continued Mrs. Mac; 'ye'd think that butther wudn't melt in her mouth, but it's ahlways them soort that goes wrong.'

Swiftly the news spread, and by half-past twelve at dinnertime all the workers in the fields about had left their haymaking, for it was harvest-time once more, to gather at this central spot and discuss the situation.

At first everybody was incredulous: such an event was almost unheard of in a community where chastity was a tradition, and insufficient nutriment kept the blood thin and the passions cold. But soon the testimony of a neighbor who had been called in put the question of fact beyond doubt.

'What did I tell ye about Andy Sweeny's dahter?' said old Patsey, taking credit for his hall-prophecy in the fuller light of after events.

'Ay, ay, deed so,' murmured the group in chorus.

Then curiosity centred itself on the point of who was the father of the child.

'It cudn't be Terry Gallagher, now,' said Mrs. Mac judicially, 'troth I'll be boun' he knew nahthin' about it, the crathur.'

'Ah, him is it?' said Owen contemptuously, 'he's too great a fule.'

'He's had a lucky escape anyways,' continued Mrs. Mac meditatively, 'I wunner now why she didn't marry him when she had the chanst, an' no wan wud ha' been a hate the wiser. Oul' Peggy'll be quare an' mad that she stopped the weddin'.'

'I cud make a boul' guess then,' broke in Hannah, who had been waiting for an opening. 'I'll houl' ye I know who owns it, an' more shame for her to lave her own wans for them as doesn't want her now that she's in trouble. I'm thinkin' it's some of the quality has a finger in it.'

'Betther kape a still tongue in yer head about the quality,' interrupted the blacksmith hastily, 'laste said's soonest mended.'

'Here's himself,' interjected one of the group by the door warningly, as Terry came into sight, climbing the hill towards them. As he drew near it could be seen that his steps were hurried and uneven, and his face as white as chalk.

He came straight up to them, and asked in a tense whisper, 'Is it thrue?' looking from one to the other.

They all avoided his eye and looked uneasily away, except Owen, in whose breast the memory of his self-humiliation of six months ago still rankled. He stepped a pace forward, and answered,—

'Aye, it sames you was good enough for her afther ahl.'

His cousin looked at him with a lack-lustre eye, as though he did not take in the meaning of the words, and, encouraged by his quiescence, Owen continued in a more pronounced tone,—

'More like it was her that wasn't good enough for yous.'

For a moment Terry stood rooted to the spot, while the blood surged upwards and veiled his eyesight with a mist, then he crouched and sprang headlong at his adversary's throat with an inarticulate snarl like a wild beast.

Owen was borne backwards by the impetus of his weight, and fell striking his head against the spike of the anvil: and Terry was torn from him by two of the men, his eyes staring and his limbs trembling with rage. When they released their hold of him, his sinews, all unstrung by the violence of his passion, gave way beneath him and he collapsed in a heap upon the floor. For a moment he sat there: then he rose to his knees, and thence to his feet, and staggered out of the door and down the road, reeling to and fro in the sunlight like a drunken man.

'Who'd ha' thought it?' said Patsey, looking after him: 'It's wunnerful what stuff a taste of the gurls does be makin' into a man. Yon wan was a suckin' calf a while ago, and now he's a young bull.'

'May the divil roast him,' exclaimed Owen, scrambling to his feet, and looking regretfully at the pool of his own blood upon the floor. 'He has me disthroyed, but I'll be even wid him yit.'

When his momentary rage had died down a great tumult was left in Terry's mind. The scene which he had just passed through had brought sharply home to him the attitude that the neighbors would take towards Bella's transgression. He pictured her to himself defenceless before her persecutors, and longed to give her the shelter of his arm and of his name. But could he offer to marry her still, and consent to be pointed at for the remainder of his life as the husband of a wanton? for scandal dies hard in the country. On the one side was ranged the whole force of a public opinion which it had never entered into his head to question until now, and of his own inherited racial instincts, and on the other his great love for this girl. He could not put it into words, but he felt dimly within him that it was she herself that he loved, and that her outward actions did not affect her inward essence, that he knew her better than any neighbor, and was a better judge of her than blind convention. He was not strong enough yet to be himself in the face of his world, but the balance wavered ever more deeply on the side of this new self that he was discovering. That he should have an opinion of his own at all was a great advance upon anything that he could have felt a year ago. But there is no forcing-house for the growth of character like disappointed love.

At the end of a fortnight he was still wavering in mind, but he could no longer rest without seeing Bella. So he put on his holiday suit, and went down the road towards her mother's cottage; but this time he did not wear the scarlet tie. As he approached the house he realized that it had a forlorn and neglected air, as though it shared the fallen estimation of its occupants; the grass grew thickly in the front yard and upon the thatched roof, and the geraniums upon the window-sill were withered and unwatered.

He pushed open the half-door and entered unasked, as was his wont. Bella was seated in the window, working at her sprigging and rocking a small wooden cradle with her foot; at the sound of his footstep she looked up with a strained hungry light in her eye, but at the sight of him a shade of disappointment flitted across her face and she continued to look past him over his shoulder as though expecting some one else. The old woman was seated on a three-legged stool crouched over the hearth while she stirred an iron pot of stirabout with a wooden pot-stick; she did not even turn her head when he entered.

'God save all here,' said Terry, awkwardly standing in the middle of the floor. His head nearly touched the blackened beam which ran across the middle of the room and supported a half-floor, whence the mingled smell of apples and dried onions came distinctly to his nostrils. He coughed and sat down upon the edge of the nearest chair, tucking his feet well under the rail and crunching his soft felt hat nervously in his hands. The swish of the thread being drawn through the embroidery was the only sound that broke the stillness, as he watched the regular sweep of Bella's arm against the window-pane.

'What's yer wull, Terry Gallagher?' snapped old Peggy abruptly, after a time.

Terry turned his hat over several times, examined the lining very carefully, and finally replied to her question with another:

'Why didn't ye let on to me yon time, mother, and let me marry her while there was time?'

At this heathenish question old Peggy rose to her full height and pointed the pot-stick accusingly at her daughter, as she said in a tone of concentrated bitterness:

'I wudn't let a wumman like yon soil an honest man's hearth.'

Bella sat unmoved, without taking the slightest notice of the words. Her mother and Terry belonged to a world outside of her which no longer affected her by their phantom movements.

But at this embodiment of the ghostly voices which he had been fighting against so long Terry sprang to his feet. In the face of concrete opposition a blind antagonism seized him which swallowed up all hesitation, and he dared to be individual. He took a stride forward, and, throwing out one arm towards the girl, said in a loud voice as though to penetrate her understanding:

'Bella, darlin', I'll marry ye now, av ye'll have me.'

Bella looked up with a faint smile of surprise, and opened her lips to answer. At that moment a thin cry came from the cradle at her feet; at the sound, while she still looked at him, a light crept over her face which transfigured it.

Then Terry knew that he had seen for the first time the love-look on a woman's face, and it was not for him. And, boor as he was, the knowledge came home to him at that instant, that for any one to marry her save the man who had the power to raise that look upon her face would be a sacrilege.

He turned with drooped head, and stumbled out of the cabin without a word.

THE LEGEND OF BARNESMORE GAP

At the point where the range of mountains which divides the Northern from the Southern half of Donegal approaches nearest to the innermost extremity of Donegal Bay, there is a wild and rocky pass which, from a distance, shows as a saddle-shaped hollow on the skyline, giving the impression of a bite taken by the mouth of a giant clean out of the centre of the mountain.

This gorge is still, as it always has been in the past, the main artery of communication between the level and fertile plains of Tyrone and Londonderry and the tract of country south of the mountains extending as far as Lough Erne. It is called Barnesmore Gap, and the following is the legend current upon the countryside as to the origin of the name.

'I tell the tale as 'twas told to me.'

At the beginning of this century when Mr. Balfour's light railways were not thought of, and even the Finn Valley Railway as yet was not, its place was taken in the internal economy of the country by the highroad running through the Gap. Great then was the congestion of traffic and the indignation of traders far and wide, when a highwayman selected the part of this road which lay amidst the mountains for the scene of his depredations, and levied toll upon all comers.

Men of a peace-loving disposition or with time to spare diverted their course round the southern extremity of the range. And as time is the least valuable commodity in Ireland and usually the least considered, the general stream of commerce followed this direction. But there were cases where urgency or impatience led to the use of the old route, and off these the highwayman made his profit.

When this state of siege had continued for some time, a gentleman of Enniskillen of the name of O'Connor had need of a sum of two hundred pounds within a certain time. This money he had to get from Derry. But he could not trust the mail, which was regularly robbed, and it would not reach him in time by any route, but the shortest—that through the Gap. None of his servants would run the risk of a meeting with the highwayman, and he had determined to take the journey himself, when a half-witted hanger-on about the house, named Blazing Barney from the color of his hair, volunteered for the sendee.

This man was a natural or a 'bit daft,' as they call it in Scotland. But his master knew that he could be sharp enough upon occasion, and no one would dream that such a half-witted creature would be trusted with such an important commission. Altogether this was the best chance of deceiving the highwayman, so he decided to risk it.

He offered Barney the pick of his weapons and his best hunter, but the omadhawn preferred to go unarmed and mounted upon the worst looking horse in the stable, an old gray, that was blind of one eye and lame of one leg, but could still do a good day's travelling. As he shrewdly remarked:

'Fwhat 'ud I be doin' on a gran' upstandin' baste like yon; the thafe beyant wud rise till the thrick in no time.'

For Barney's silliness only came on in fits at the season of the new moon; at other times he was merely a slightly exaggerated type of that mixture of simplicity with a certain low-bred cunning in practical matters which has distinguished the countryman in all ages from the larger-minded dweller in cities. The present was a lucid interval, so he could be trusted to take care of himself.

So Barney jogged along on his way towards Derry, through Fermanagh and Donegal, without fear of any ill, and only had to ask for what he wanted in the way of food and shelter in order to get it. The simple-hearted peasantry never grudge 'bit nor sup' to the poor of their own order, and those afflicted as he was they regard as being under the special protection of heaven.

With the help of an early start, in spite of the sorriness of his nag, he managed the fifty miles between Enniskillen and the town of Donegal on the first day, and early on the second reached the Gap. It was a moist, drizzling morning, and as he rode in among the mountains a damp mist closed down upon him, almost hiding the ground beneath him from his sight. The road passed upwards along the mountain side, until it became a mere ledge jutting out from it, and forming a break in the sheer descent of the cliff; on the one hand was a precipice, from the bottom of which came the ripple of rushing waters to warn the traveller from its brink, on the other rose the steep hillside, whence he could hear above him the muffled crowing of the grouse among the heather.

Suddenly a gigantic figure outlined itself upon the mist, seeming to Barney larger than human, and he crossed himself as he rode nearer to it. But as the deceitful folds of vapor rolled away from it, the figure, resolved itself into a man on horseback standing across the roadway at its narrowest point.

'Where are ye for?' said the stranger shortly.

'It's a saft day, yer 'ahner, an' where am I for, is it? Well, I'll just tell ye, it's Derry I'm for, that same, an' mebbe ye'll infarm me if I'm on the right road.' And Barney giggled vacantly.

'What are you laughing at, fool?'

'Laffin' is it me, yer 'ahner? Troth I was only—'

'Don't stand bletherin' there,' interrupted the other angrily. 'What'll ye be doin' at Derry?'

'At Derry? He! he! he! That's just fwhat I was tould not to let an to a livin' sowl, but there can be no harrum, musha, in tellin' a fine jintleman like yersilf now, kin there now? I'm goin' to Derry for two hunner pund. That's what I'll be doin'. What do ye say to that?'

'An' who'd give you two hundred pounds, ye cod ye?'

'Two hunner pun', he! he! he! two hunner pun'..!'

'Look here, my good fellow, does this money belong to you?'

'Me is it? No for shure, it's the masther's.'

'And who's your master?'

'The masther? Troth he's just the masther, he! he! he!'

'What's his name, you idiot?'

'Oh his name, his name's Misther O'Connor of Inniskilling.'

'And has he much money?'

'Lashins.'

'An' what did the master send you for?'

'Fwhat for? Two hunner pun', he! he! he!'

'Why did he choose you to send? Don't you know that there is a highwayman on this road?'

'Ah, that's just it yer 'ahner, I'm only a fule, so the thafe of the wurruld won't suspect me, but mebbe I'll not be such a fule as he thinks me.'

'How do you know I'm not the highwayman?'

'Ah ye're makin' game yer 'ahner. A fine jintleman like yersilf on a splendacious baste, the likes of yon is it that would be a dhirty robber? I'm not such a fule as to think that.'

'Well, well, what would you do if you did meet the robber?'

'Rin like a hare, yer 'ahner.'

'That old horse of yours wouldn't, I'm thinkin'. And if ye couldn't run?'

'Well, I dunno,' and Barney scratched his head—'stan' I spose an' give him the money if he axed far it.'

'A nice cowardly thing to do with your master's property.'

'Betther be a coward nor a corp,' replied Barney pithily.

'Well, I hope you'll find Derry a good sort of place.'

'For sartin, shure. Why wudn't I? I hear tell ye can git as much cahfee there for a pinny as wud make tay for tin min.'

'Will you shake your elbow?'

'Thank ye kindly, sirr, but niver a dhrain do I take.'

'Well, the loss is yours. Here's luck!' and the stranger raised the rejected flask to his own lips.

'Will you be coming back this way?'

'I dunno.'

'What day will you be coming back, d'ye think?'

'I d'no.'

'To-morrow?'

'Aiblins.'

'Well, will ye be coming back the day after?'

'Mebbe I might an' mebbe I mightn't, an' mebbe I might too.' The omadhawn had turned suddenly sulky after the manner of his kind, and it was evident that there was nothing more to be got out of him. The stranger saw this, and said, 'Well, don't go telling everybody you meet all you've told me, and mind you don't get robbed before you get back here. Good luck to you.'

'Morrow till ye, an' God be wi' ye, whereever ye go,' responded the haverel as he rode off.

Two days afterwards Barney was once more passing through the Gap, this time on his return journey. It was evening and the scene was very different from the first occasion of his visit to the place. Instead of damp and mist there was now brilliant sunshine which flooded the valley and the far hill-sides with purple light, and glittered upon the surface of the brook with the slanting rays of eventide. Barney could now see that the side of the precipice leading downwards from the road was not absolutely perpendicular, but was diversified with rocky ledges and huge boulders, which lent a wild and rugged aspect to the scenery, intensified by the great mountains which towered steeply upon either hand. While the sight of the sea in the background added to the loneliness of the mountains the vaster loneliness of the ocean.

At a turn of the road he came upon the stranger stationed at the same point as before, and as then drawn up across the path.

'Why it's yer 'ahner's self agin,' cried Barney delightedly, 'more power to yer elbow.'

'Oh, so you're here, then,' said the other with evident relief, 'where's the money?'

'The money is it? Troth it's in my pooch safe enough, I'll warrant, I thought I'd sarcumvint that robber villain.'

'Hand it over.'

'I hope yer 'ahner hasn't met him yersilf at ahl.'

'Hand it over.'

'Hand what over? Is it me yer talkin' to, surr?'

'Yes, I want that money you've got. I'm the highwayman.'

'Now you're jokin', surr,' said the natural anxiously. 'Shure ye wouldn't go to play a thrick that road upon a poor bhoy.'

'Don't stand jabberin' there, give me the hard stuff.'

'An' he was the thafe ahl the time, see that now, he! he! he!' and the idiot went into a fit of laughter, rocking himself to and fro on his horse, and wagging his hands helplessly.

'Give me the money, damn you,' said the robber out of patience as he drew a pistol from his holster, 'or I'll shoot you.'

'Oh, wirra, wirra, shure yer 'ahner wouldn't harrum Barney, he's only a nathral, that never done no one no hurt, may the saints presarve ye.'

'I don't want to hurt you,' said the other, 'but I must have that two hundred pounds, so just hand it over, and no more foolery.'

'Ah thin,' cried the idiot, flying into a passion, which lent fluency to his invective, 'bad cess to ye for a decaivin' sarpent, may the divil roast ye for yer blandandherin' ways, gettin' me saycrit fram me, an' thin thurnin' on me. Bad scran to yer sowl. My curse and the curse of Crummle rest on ye. Sorra till ye. May ye live till ye wish ye were dead, an' die like a dog in a ditch, but the divil a thraneen of the masther's wud ye get, if I had to throw it from here into the say, so now,' and before the robber could prevent him he had taken the two packages of money from his pocket and thrown them down the precipice.

'Ay, luk at it now, luk at the goold aleppin' an' arowlin' over the stones, there's yer money, ye thafe ye, much good may it do ye.'

As he spoke the paper packages burst on the rocks below, and the glittering shower of coins could be seen leaping from point to point, ever gathering velocity, while the ring of the metal upon the stones mingled with the babbling of the brook, towards which they were hastening.

With a curse the robber replaced his pistol in its holster, leaped from his horse, and began scrambling down the cliff, to try and save a part of the spoil if possible.

'He! he! he!' laughed the idiot, as he rocked and swayed at the edge of the precipice, and he giggled and slobbered and gibbered, as he pointed at the robber toiling after his elusive quest.

When the highwayman was about half-way down the descent, Barney mounted the other's fine black horse and began to ride off, leaving his own old screw behind.

'Stop, damn your soul,' cried the highwayman, starting to climb up again. 'What are ye doin', ye jape ye? Stop, or I'll shoot ye.'

'Shute away, ye blatherskite,' replied Barney cheerfully, 'haven't I got yer pistols in yer own holsters? but I'm thinkin' I'm goin' to take this illigant baste of yer 'ahner's instid av me own. Shure, fair exchange is no robbery, an' ye can make up the differ in the price foreby the lucks-penny with all them bright farthin's down there. I got them out of the bank o' purpose for yous.'

After that day the highwayman was seen no more in his accustomed haunts. But in honor of the omadhawn's stratagem the place has ever since borne the name of Barney's or Barnesmore Gap.

'MORE CRUEL THAN THE GRAVE'

There were four of them,—two men and two girls,—and they sat on the top of the outermost cliffs of Donegal, dangling their legs over the Atlantic. Behind them stretched Donegal Bay, with its rugged, mountainous shores and varied inlets, the sun throwing purple shadows on the steep sides of Slieve League. In this direction they could see the long lines of towering black-faced cliffs, clad in parts with honeysuckle and capped with heather, giving place as they marched inland to lowland stretches, where the sandy dunes with their tufted bent-grass sloped gradually to the water's edge, from which they were separated by strips of hard and silvery strand. Looking out westward in front of them there was nothing but the wide ocean between them and America.

'Well, and how do you find your new parish, Fairchild?' said the elder of the two men, throwing a piece of rock-slate at a passing gull, 'slightly different from anything you ever came across in England, isn't it?'

'Yes, this is an entirely new experience for me. Of course six months is a very short time to justify a wholesale opinion, but I never imagined previously that quite such a primitive people could exist anywhere in these islands.'

The speaker was a young English curate, only recently appointed to this out-of-the-way parish of Kilcross. His companion was a young ship's doctor home on leave. The two girls were the granddaughters of the vicar, one of the few clergymen in Ireland who refused to commute at the time of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and who now, at the advanced age of ninety, was still enjoying the fruits of his obstinacy. It could be seen from the bundles beside them that the girls were on their way to a bathe, when they had met the two men and fallen into conversation with them.

'Primitive is just the word to describe them,' replied the doctor, 'it is curious how utterly our civilization has passed them by in this remote corner of the world, and left them exactly the same as their earliest forefathers must have been generations back. A fisher folk are proverbially benighted, but shut in here between the seriousness of the barren soil on the one hand and the melancholy of the Atlantic upon the other, the inhabitants of these highland villages upon the seaboard are utterly barbarous. And they possess all the virtues and vices of uncivilized types. Hospitable, good-natured, treacherous and superstitious, they have the unreflecting cruelty common to the child and the savage—I could tell you some horrible stories about that if I liked—joined to—what shall I call it?—their want of solidarity of character.'

'I don't quite understand, though you are saying things that I have often dimly tried to puzzle out for myself,' interrupted the elder girl.

'I suppose you refer to my last phrase, Miss Ruth. I mean that there is no common element running through their natures and joining their different moods and emotions together, harmonizing them or shading them off one into the other. There is no coherence about them, no compromise, they are a mere medley of odd passions, all in the raw and without sequence, each following crudely and logically from its own peculiar premises. None of their moods ever has reference to any previous mood.'

'I suppose, Seymour,' said the clergyman thoughtfully, 'that is why I have found I could never get any grip of them. I have often thought I was progressing favorably, making an impression, and then at some sudden turn, as they express it themselves, I have "come a jundy up agin'" a blank-wall in their character, and had to confess myself baffled again.'

'Yes, that is it. I have been brought up among them and been familiar with them since childhood, and I can safely say that with the exception of Miss Ruth here, I have never known any one not of their own race and religion obtain any hold over them, or exercise the slightest effect upon their conduct in any one way, and even her influence stops short with the women. The difficulty is that there is no central point to work upon. There is no use trying to argue with them or soften them. One mood can only be exorcised by another. Their obstinacy or their superstition can only be cast out by an appeal to their cupidity or their fear. It is there that the hold of the Roman Catholic Church over them comes in. The priest has the power to excommunicate any one at any time, which means not only destruction for them in the next world, but also discomfort in this. We Protestants have no such deterrents. If you take my advice you won't remain here long. You don't sympathize enough with the people ever to understand them. They want a stern, determined, coarse-grained nature to drive them. You are too delicate and subtle for them. Your work is all thrown away here.'

'The people are not necessarily the only attraction,' returned the curate a little sullenly.

'Oh, do come and look at this wee bubbly bit,' broke in the younger girl, who, unlike her more mature and graver sister had ceased to pay any further attention to the conversation, as soon as she found that it had turned upon the 'Parish.'

'Just watch it,' she continued, pointing to a crevice in the rocks below, 'the water is ever so far away down, and then it rises gradually higher and higher until it reaches the edge with a "plop" and runs over, and then it sinks again right down until it leaves the long wrack at the sides hanging clear out of the water and dripping down into it like dead water snakes, till the next wave comes and flushes them into life again,' and she bobbed her head gravely in time with the rhythmical heave and subsidence of the recurrent surges, glinting the sunlight from her bright gold hair.

'Yes, that shows a very heavy swell. It is the distant muttering of a storm far out in the Atlantic. A bad sign for your bathe. In fact I don't think you ought to bathe at all to-day, Miss Selina. These ground-swells are very dangerous, and the sea looks angry to-day. Just notice how dirty and disturbed the water is with the sand stirred up from its depths. That fringe of seaweed too along the tidal mark is ominous.'

'Dangerous, nonsense,' replied the girl. 'Why, the sea is as calm as a mill-pond, and I never saw a lovelier day. You're becoming a perfect old woman, Dr. Seymour. I'm sure even Mr. Fairchild doesn't think it dangerous, now, do you?'

'It certainly appears calm enough to me,' said the person thus appealed to.

Seymour flushed and retorted shortly with a slight sneer.

'Fairchild doesn't know the sea well enough to be afraid of it. He speaks out of the depths of his ignorance. But a wilful woman must have her way. So I'll leave you to your bathe. Good morning!' and the two men turned away along the top of the cliff, while the girls ran gayly down the sloping path that led to the little cove below. They had not gone far before Seymour recovered from his temporary ill-humor, and halted.

'I'm not easy in my mind about those girls,' he said. 'A ground-swell like that is more treacherous than the nature of our Irish friends beyond. I think we ought to wait here within earshot of them,' and they both sat down upon the sod bank with their backs to the sea.

For a time there was a moody silence, which the clergyman broke at last, enviously, kicking his heels against the sod ditch.

'Of course I've got no chance against you. I can see that. And I think it's hardly fair.'

'Eh! why! what!' ejaculated the other, starting out of a reverie.

'That we are both in love with the same girl. And what chance have I against a man of the world like you, who has travelled and studied human nature and womankind? I think it's hardly fair,' repeated the youth with what sounded suspiciously like a snivel.

'But I thought it was the sister you were in love with.'

'Oh, nonsense. The sister's all very well in her way. But no one could look at her for a moment while the other one is by.'

'No, of course not,' assented Seymour with conviction.

'She is so beautiful, so large and gracious and serene.'

'That's not at all how I read it. Your notion of her sounds very much like the character of—hark! what's that?'

A shrill long-drawn scream came pealing towards them across the sea. They rose together and rushed tumultuously along the cliffs, towards the sound, meeting another shriller than the first as they ran. Suddenly they burst into sight of the little cove, and halted in surprise. So peaceful was the scene. The sun was smiling broadly down upon an ocean breathing the long deep respirations of a dreamless slumber—couchant like a beast of prey. In the foreground the two girls, clinging apprehensively together, were standing up to their waist in water, their figures in the clinging bathing gowns darkly silhouetted against the muddy light green of the sandy-bottomed bay.

But even as they gazed a silent treacherous undulation passed like a breath across the naked bosom of the sleeping ocean and crept stealthily up to the terrified figures. Swiftly it lapped their breasts and stole upwards about their throats. And still it rose and rose with slow remorseless volume, till it met softly above their heads, leaving a few bubbles to mark the spot where they had been. The giant swell passed on its way, and for a moment they were seen wallowing helplessly at large in the trough. Then the back surge returned upon them and swept them seawards.

'Good God, they'll be drowned,' cried Seymour, throwing off his coat. 'What are you doing? You can't swim. Run as hard as you can to the village for a boat. I'll do all that can be done here.'

'Promise to save her at all costs.'

'Ay, I swear to that, though I and the other one should tread the short road to hell.'

The clergyman turned and ran vehemently away, his coat-tails flying in the breeze.

'Bring the priest with you if you can,' shouted Seymour after him, but a summer breath caught the words and wafted them away, and though the vague echo of them reached the runner's ears, their full import did not penetrate to his brain.

Reaching the village he quickly got a boat. The crew threw themselves into it, urged on by the women to 'be sure and save Miss Ruth.'

As soon as they rounded the horn of the bay a great throb of mingled joy and anguish gripped the young man by the throat. For a dripping figure was standing upon the shore and he knew that his love was saved—saved by his rival.

Midway between the boat and the shore was a small point of rock, to which the figure of the other girl could be seen clinging; so she too was safe. Beyond that again a swimmer's head was visible in the water. Directly they opened the point upon him, Seymour saw them, and, with a wave of his hand, turned wearily shorewards. The girl's eyes were bent on her rescuer away from the boat, and her numbed senses did not perceive the sound of the approaching oars. She thought herself abandoned, and, losing hope, released her hold and slipped off into the water. With a shout the boatmen dashed to her rescue.

For a few moments the bowman groped in the water with the boathook without success, but at last it caught in the girl's bathing dress and he drew her to the surface. The other men clustered around him and began to chatter in a low tone. The stroke, a man of huge stature called 'Big Dan Murphy,' sat stolidly opposite the curate, shutting out the view. As the men still chattered and made no further move Fairchild grew uneasy. Something in the harsher notes of their voices betokened a change of mood. That momentary check had been fatal, it had allowed their enthusiasm to cool and given an opening for more calculating thoughts.

'What are you doing, men? Lift her into the boat,' he said, and rising to his feet he saw for the first time the face supported just above the surface of the water. The face was the face of Ruth—Ruth whom he had thought safe on shore. 'My God, lift her in quick,' he repeated, with a tremor in his voice.

The men muttered together, looking at him askance. One of them spoke a few words in strident Erse to the stroke.

'What does he say, Dan?' the young man demanded impatiently.

'He says,' replied the other phlegmatically, 'that she's a corp ahlready, and that it will only bring bad luck to the fishin' to take a dead body intil the boat.'

'But she's not dead,' cried Fairchild wildly, 'she was alive this minute on the rock. Make them lift her in.'

'Ye shud ha' brought the priest wid ye,' responded the giant with a neutral compassion; 'them wans is not to be druv by no man barrin' him, when they jine to take a conthrairy notion yon road.'

At this the echo of Seymour's last words returned clearly upon Fairchild's brain, and he cursed himself for his inattention. With it, too, there returned the remembrance of other words of Seymour's. He recognized that this was a crisis and braced himself to make a fight of it.

'Good God, men,' said he, 'you don't mean to say you will let a woman die before your eyes for a miserable superstition like that? Why, I can see her breathe; she's as much alive as any of us. See, she's opening her eyes. For God's sake lift her in,' he broke off, in frenzied tones. They turned indifferently away, and the hopelessness of pulling against the dead weight of their superstition settled down over his mind and enveloped it in black despair. But he continued desperately:

'If you take her in I'll give you money,—a hundred pounds a head,—five hundred pounds,—I'll give you all that I've got.' For a moment their attention was attracted and their cupidity aroused. But the sums he mentioned were so large that they defeated his own object. They conveyed no meaning to the narrow minds of the fishermen accustomed to think in pence. They sounded in their ears like promises of fairy gold. Had he offered them a new boat and nets they would have understood it and jumped at the offer. But he paid the penalty now of not knowing his ground. Once more they turned away.

Then something went snap in his temple, and he lost control over himself, and with that all chance of influencing them.

'You are not men,' he raved, the tears streaming from his eyes, 'but brutes. It is too cruel. You can't mean it. Will no one help me? I'll have you all hung for murdering her. Why haven't I got a pistol with me? and I'd shoot you all like dogs. You hounds, I'll strangle you now,' and he threw himself choked with sobs upon the stroke. But it was not more hopeless to cast his puny force against the dead wall of their superstition than against that iron chest. The giant took him in his arms like an infant, and replaced him gently upon his seat. The others laughed.

'Av the whelp doesn't quit bletherin', putt him in the wather along of his swateheart, Dan,' said one of them in an ugly tone.

The young man rose again from his seat, and tried to cast himself over the side, even though he couldn't swim, to be beside his beloved. But again he was caught and placed on the thwart, to which this time he was strapped down, so that mercifully he could not see over the gunwale of the boat.

Then the men tied a rope round the girl's arms, dropped her calmly into the water again, resumed their oars, and rowed sullenly back the mile to the village. Behind them the body spun at the end of its long rope. In the stern-sheets curses and blasphemies bubbled from the lips of a gibbering maniac.

When they reached the shore, not only was life extinct, but both the girl's arms were broken. The sea itself would have been more merciful than that.

* * * * * *

When Fairchild awoke from his long bout of brain fever his eyes fell upon Seymour.

'Why didn't you save her as you promised?' were the first words he uttered.

'Nonsense, old man, you're wandering still. Of course I saved her. You forget, it was her sister Ruth that those devils murdered.'

'Oh, it's all a horrible mistake,' groaned the invalid, as he buried his face in his hands and turned his head to the wall, moaning like a wounded thing in pain.

THE AIR-GUN

It was Philip Brandon's last day at Oxford. Behind him lay four pleasant years spent partly in dawdling through the Honors schools, chiefly in gratifying his own various tastes for athletics, social intercourse, and contemporary literature. In front of him lay—what? The thought stuck in his throat; so, in an unsettled spirit, he lit a cigar and sauntered out into the High, with a vague idea of doing the rounds as he used in his schoolboy days, and taking a last farewell of the old city's 'coronal of towers.'

Passing a gunsmith's, he remembered he wanted some cartridges, and, going in to buy them, saw there that fatal air-gun, which he afterwards declared to himself was the cause of all his troubles. Curiously enough this shirking of the responsibility of his own acts was not in his case a sign of weakness, it was his very directness of mind that made him perceive and value the morality of his own conduct with the same remorseless logic as he extended to his neighbors, and would have made him intolerable to himself had he not taken refuge in some such obliquity of mental vision. A man who is free from self-deception is not a man at all, but a monster. Self-hypocrisy, after all, is only another form of self-respect, and it is part of human nature to desire our own good opinion no less than other people's.

To outward seeming the air-gun was merely an ordinary hazel walking-stick with a crook handle, and the closest examination would barely reveal its real nature. In his restless mood this novelty in puzzles took Brandon's fancy, and he bought it on the spot. There was something sinister and secret about having this unsuspected weapon. He was pleased with it, as he had been pleased when a boy with his first sword-stick; and he determined then and there to tell no one that it was more than it actually appeared—an ordinary walking-stick.

He had packed all his luggage and warehoused his furniture in readiness for his start to Ireland in the morning, so there was nothing left to be done but to wonder why he was going there at all. His uncle had hitherto paid his way through school and college, but had recently told him that his income had been so diminished by the depreciation in Irish land, that he could no longer afford to continue his allowance or start him in a profession, as he had originally intended; so that, on leaving the 'Varsity, Philip must shift for himself, but would be welcome, if he chose, to come on a visit while 'looking about him.'

This invitation Philip had accepted, though without much feeling of gratitude to his uncle. He felt that he had been hardly used. He had been led to expect a fair start in a profession; and now, at an age when most other avenues of employment were closed to him, with a useless general education and no means of supplementing it with a special one, he was calmly turned adrift. It would have been kinder to have cast him off earlier, when his tastes were still unformed and his notions less refined. Even now he could not help feeling that it would only have taken a slight effort on his uncle's part to redeem the tacit pledges he had given; but with all his easy good-nature, the old man had the failing, which so often goes with it, of intense selfishness, and had no idea of curtailing his own pleasures in order to set his nephew upon his legs. It would do the young man good, he thought, to knock about a little at the outset. But he had made a mistake: Philip's nature was too intense to take kindly to such discipline, it was apt to strike in too deeply, and there was no knowing what the result might be. As it was, Oxford had performed its part for him, as for so many other penniless young men, of totally unfitting him for any professions but the pulpit and the birch-rod, the two which his soul most utterly abhorred.

Perhaps it would have been wiser under these circumstances to have started work at once, but Philip felt a desire to take breath before his plunge into the stream of life. Hitherto his life had been a series of preparations for some one definite event,—his examinations, the end of his school life, the end of his university life. Now he had come to the end of the latter, and he found that it was not an end nor even a beginning. The whole of life lay spread before him to choose from, with no means of making a choice. Contemplating it in the mass, the boundless indefiniteness of the prospect bewildered his gaze and paralyzed his energies. The world was so large he did not know where to begin upon it. He was not close enough to it to recognize that there, as elsewhere, only a single stage of the journey occupies our attention at a time. He shrank aghast into himself and took refuge in habit. His habit led him to his uncle's house.

Arrived in the cheerful island of his birth, what with the dampness of the climate, and the dulness of country life at Lisnamore, his lassitude grew upon him and enveloped him as with a miasma. He was always a great reader, and now did little else but read novels. Real life pressed so heavily upon him, that he was driven to take refuge in a world of unrealities. But they increased rather than diminished his malady. This cloud of alien personalities obscured his own, acting upon his mind like an anæsthetic, so that for weeks he lived and moved in that atmosphere of unreality which constant novel-reading engenders, and which is so apt to unfit one for the stress of actual life. A melancholy and moodiness of humor possessed him, so that he passed whole days with scarcely speaking a word, and to the other inmates of the house he appeared a very different person from the light-hearted and good-natured lad of former visits.

In fact, up to this point in his life the easy good-nature common to the rest of his family had been his most salient characteristic upon the surface, and he had taken for granted that it was part of his real nature. So long as the world had treated him kindly he had met it in his turn with a most amiable countenance. It is true that he had not been widely popular at college, but he had explained this to himself by ascribing it to too great self-reliance on his own part. His epithets for his own character in the secret places of his heart were 'strong' and 'original'—epithets which he had justified to a certain extent at Balliol by going his own way irrespective of Dons and lectures, and by a certain readiness to act without reference to conventional standards or traditions, together with a disdain for the ordinary grooves of life, which made his conduct under any given circumstances difficult to foretell. Nevertheless, he had been liked by his own set; and when he did go out of his way to cultivate an acquaintance, perhaps partly owing to this very fastidiousness of his, he rarely failed to attract.

But now that his lot had become soured, he surprised himself at times indulging in moods and fancies, that showed him there were unsuspected forces in his nature which had hitherto lain dormant, but which might spring into activity at any instant. In his moments of introspection he sometimes dimly wondered now if he were not in truth just a little bit selfish at bottom, else how to account for this extravagant solicitude about his own fortunes.

The fact was that the unsettlement of the conditions of his existence, the gravity of this first appearance of his upon the platform of every-day life, and the dreariness of the outlook had affected his nature more deeply than he was himself aware. His life at Oxford, with its atmosphere of ease and luxury, had unfitted him for the stern realities of the world in which he was now called upon to earn his bread. The hopelessness in modern life of effecting one's aim had thus early begun to impress him. Nowadays, as heretofore, he saw that effort is not wasted, but that it produces a result absurdly inadequate to the force expended. Everywhere around him he saw men of brilliant parts and dauntless courage ground beneath the wheels of that modern Juggernaut, the soul-destroying round of mechanical toil; men whose ambition originally would not have strained at kingdoms, reduced to hack writers for journals and ushers in a school. A young man aims at the moon and hits a suburban cottage. Pegasus is put to grind a mill. Seeing all this, he felt shut-in upon every side. For a time he beat the pinions of his mind helplessly against his prison-bars. Then the black moodiness of despair enwrapped him in its folds. He had no tools with which to shape his destiny, so he apathetically left the issue upon the knees of Fate.

But he was young and buoyant, and this depression could not last forever. The first sign of its breaking up was a desire for outdoor exercise. He roused himself from his lethargy, and to escape its influence determined on a fishing excursion to a distant mountain lough. He thought that the drive and the fresh air would re-invigorate him. And indeed by the time he had accomplished the twelve miles there, and had caught a few trout, he was more like his usual self; but by noon the weather had settled down into one of those broiling days which one occasionally meets with in Ireland, generally in October, and fishing had become hopeless. The fish were small, but plentiful, and now they rose all round him, and flapped his flies with their tails in a tantalizingly derisive manner.