l this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great
granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the
sea, like cattle on a summer's day. There they stand, for all the world
like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their sides
instead of heather; and the great sea conger to wreathe about the base of
them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days you can go
wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following you about
the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man that hears
that cauldron boiling.

Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much
greater in size. Indeed, they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea,
for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick as
a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the tides,
some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that on a clear, westerly
blowing day, I have counted, from the top of Aros, the great rollers
breaking white and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried reefs. But
it is nearer in shore that the danger is worst; for the tide, here
running like a mill race, makes a long belt of broken water--a _Roost_ we
call it--at the tail of the land. I have often been out there in a dead
calm at the slack of the tide; and a strange place it is, with the sea
swirling and combing up and boiling like the cauldrons of a linn, and now
and again a little dancing mutter of sound as though the _Roost_ were
talking to itself. But when the tide begins to run again, and above all
in heavy weather, there is no man could take a boat within half a mile of
it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer or live in such a place.
You can hear the roaring of it six miles away. At the seaward end there
comes the strongest of the bubble; and it's here that these big breakers
dance together--the dance of death, it may be called--that have got the
name, in these parts, of the Merry Men. I have heard it said that they
run fifty feet high; but that must be the green water only, for the spray
runs twice as high as that. Whether they got the name from their
movements, which are swift and antic, or from the shouting they make
about the turn of the tide, so that all Aros shakes with it, is more than
I can tell.

The truth is, that in a south-westerly wind, that part of our arc