he main barrier of Menawhidden, where it breaks up
towards its western end into a maze of islets. While I pulled, the
Vicar knelt on the bottom-boards and made fast the stone to John Emmet's
feet.

Well, I need not tell the rest of our adventure at length. We reached
the Carracks, and there the Vicar pulled out a short surplice from the
immense inner pocket of his pea-jacket, donned it, and read the burial
service in due form by the light of his dark lantern: and by the light
of it, as I arranged John Emmet's shroud, I had my first and last
glimpse of his face--a thin face, old and hollow, with grey
side-whiskers: a face extraordinarily pallid: in other circumstances
perhaps not noticeable unless it were for a look of extreme weariness
which had lasted even into the rest of death.

"We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption,
looking for the resurrection of the body (when the sea shall give up her
dead), and the life of the world to come. . . ."

Together we balanced it on the gunwale, and with the help of the
stern-board tilted it over. It dropped, into fifteen fathoms of water.

There was another funeral next day in Lansulyan churchyard--where so
many have come to be buried who never in life heard the name of
Lansulyan: the harvest of Menawhidden, commemorated on weather-beaten
stones and, within the church, on many tablets which I used to con on
Sundays during the Vicar's discourses. The life-boat men had mustered
in force, and altogether there was a large attendance at the graveside.
At one point a fit of coughing interrupted the Vicar in his recital of
the service. I was the one auditor, however, who understood the meaning
of it.

That evening we took our dessert again under the great elm. Somehow I
felt certain he would choose this hour for his explanation: and in due
course it came.

"I'm a truth-speaking man by habit," he began after a long gaze upwards
at the rooks now settling to roost and making a mighty pother of it.
"But I'm afraid there's no getting round the fact that this afternoon I
acted a lie. And yet, on the whole, my conscience is easy."

He sipped his wine, and went on meditatively--

"Morals have their court of equity as well as the law of the land: and
with us"--the Vicar was an old-fashioned Churchman--"that court is the
private conscience. In this affair you insisted on putting your
conscience into my hands. Well, I took the responsibility, and