s telling me this morning that it's alive with
rats, such rats nobody ever seen. They have the island pretty near eat
away."

"Talk sense," said Priscilla.

"They came out on the tide swimming," said Peter, "like as it might be
a shoal of mackerel, and you think there'd be no end to them climbing up
over the stones and eating all before them."

"Shove her bow round, Peter; and keep that rat story of yours for the
young man in Flanagan's boat. Hell believe it if he's as innocent as you
say."

Peter shoved out the _Tortoise_. The wind caught the sail. Priscilla
paid out the main sheet and let the boom swing forward. Peter shouted a
last warning from the slip.

"Joseph Antony was telling me," he said, "that they're terrible fierce,
worser than any rats ever he seen."

The _Tortoise_ slipped along and was soon beyond the reach of his voice.
She passed the heavy hookers at the quay side, left buoy after buoy
behind her, bobbed cheerfully through a tide race at the stone perch,
and stood out, the wind right behind her, for Rossmore Head.

CHAPTER VI

Rosnacree Bay is a broad stretch of water, but those who go down to
it in boats are singularly at the mercy of the tides. Save for certain
channels the water everywhere is shallow. At some remote period, it
seems, the ocean broke in and submerged a tract of low land between the
mountains which bound the north and south shores of the bay. What once
were round hillocks rising from boggy pasture land are now islands,
sloping eastwards to the water as they once sloped eastwards to green
fields, but torn and chafed into steep bluffs where the sea beats on
their western sides.

But the ocean's conquest is incomplete. Its empire is disputed still.
The very violence of the assault has checked its advance by piling up
a mighty breakwater of boulders right across the mouth of the bay.
Gathered upon sullenly firm based rocks these great round stones roll
and roar and crash when the full force of the Atlantic billows comes
foaming against them. They save the islands east of them. There are gaps
in the breakwater, and the sea rushes through these, but it is tamed of
its ferocity, humiliated from the grandeur of its strength so that it
wanders, puzzled, bewildered, through the waterways among the islands.
The land asserts itself. Things which belong to the land approach with
contemptuous familiarity the very verges of their mighty foe. On the
edges of the water the islander