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Stranryan is a largish town, historical and ancient, as its narrow and
crooked streets sufficiently attest. At that period of the year it was
exceedingly malodorous, and in the gutters tangle-headed children fished
for spoil, or with noise and clangour dragged the damaged dead cat and
the too-long-drowned puppy from the green ooze of one midden hole to
another.

But to make some amends for this, one was never far away from the salt
waters of the loch. And a breath straight from the great sea came every
now and then all day long, to air out the packed houses and crooked
alleys. Down on the sea front were many boats. For at the season when
the Bothy was captured and Stair and the spy led to the "Auld Castle,"
the herring boats were getting ready for the Loch Fyne catch--a good
three hundred of them, and their brown and red sails brightened
everything.

Fish-scales glistened on the cobbled quays of the little port. Salesmen
and buyers moved piles of fish contumeliously, saying, "It is naught! It
is naught!" after the manner of their kind since the days of
Solomon--who had experience in such matters, for he was undoubtedly
scandalously "had" in his traffic with the spice merchants.

The gaol of Stranryan was also on the water front, and especially when
the Irish harvesters landed among the products of the herring catch, it
was the witness of complex and accumulated villainies. There were
faction fights among the Irishry themselves. There were fights between
all the Irish united and the douce burghers and tradesmen of
Stranryan--fights about eggs and chickens, fights about water and other
privileges, fights which ended in sleepers being ousted from barns and
stables, or triumphantly retaining possession thereof. There were also
religious quarrels, in which the true "Protestants" of the two countries
broke the heads of the true "Kyatholics," and had their heads broken in
turn, all to the greater glory of God.

All these things were normal, and the participants seldom ended their
shillelah practice within the walls of "MacJannet's Hotel"--MacJannet
being the name of the chief gaoler of the town prison.

"The Castle" itself was a tall old hump of a building set in a courtyard
with high-spiked walls. It had once been a town house of the reigning
family of the Kennedys of Cassillis. They used to spend some time there
by the waterside during the summer after the long winter months at
Ma