eer for coming dawn. Never did hours lag so lazily. The darkness
seemed to last for an eternity, and when at last day did break, it was
through the lowering gloom of skies still charged with rain, and an
atmosphere loaded with vapour.

'This is a day for the chimney-corner, and thankful to have it we ought
to be,' said my old guide, as he replenished the turf fire, at which
he was preparing our breakfast. 'Father Doogan will be home here afore
night, I'm sure, and as we have nothing better to do, I'll tell you some
of our old adventures when I lived with Mr. Brooke. Twill sarve to pass
the time, anyway.'

'I'm off to Murrah, as soon as I have eaten something,' replied I.

'Tis little you know what a road it is,' said he, smiling dubiously.
''Tis four mountain rivers you 'd have to cross, two of them, at least,
deeper than your head, and there's the pass of Barnascorney, where you
'd have to turn the side of a mountain, with a precipice hundreds of
feet below you, and a wind blowing that would wreck a seventy-four!
There 's never a man in the barony would venture over the same path with
a storm ragin' from the nor'-west.'

'I never heard of a man being blown away off a mountain,' said I,
laughing contemptuously.

'Arrah, didn't ye, then? then maybe ye never lived in parts where the
heaviest ploughs and harrows that can be laid in the thatch of a cabin
are flung here and there, like straws, and the strongest timbers torn
out of the walls, and scattered for miles along the coast, like the
spars of a shipwreck.'

'But so long as a man has hands to grip with----'

'How ye talk! sure, when the wind can tear the strongest trees up by
the roots; when it rolls big rocks fifty and a hundred feet out of their
place; when the very shingle on the mountain-side is flying about like
dust and sand, where would your grip be? It is not only on the mountains
either, but down in the plains, ay, even in the narrowest glens, that
the cattle lies down under shelter of the rocks; and many's the time a
sheep, or even a heifer, is swept away off the cliffs into the sea.'

With many an anecdote of storm and hurricane he seasoned our little
meal of potatoes. Some curious enough, as illustrating the precautionary
habits of a peasantry, who, on land, experience many of the vicissitudes
supposed peculiar to the sea; others too miraculous for easy credence,
but yet vouched for by him with every affirmative of truth. He displayed
all his power