rain, swooping past in torrents,
concealed the sky, and covered the earth with darkness. Muttering in no
favourable spirit over the waywardness of that sex, to whose peculiar
interposition he ascribed his present excursion, Kerry plodded along,
turning, as he went, a despairing look at the barren and bleak prospect
around him. To seek for shelter in the glen, he knew was out of the
question, and so he at once determined to gain the priest's cottage,
where a comfortable turf fire and a rasher of bacon were certain to
welcome him.

Dreadful as the weather was, Kerry wondered that he met no one on the
road. He expected to have seen groups of people, and all the signs of
that excitement the arrival of the French might be supposed to call
forth; but, on the contrary, everything was desolate as usual, not
a human being appeared, nor could he hear a signal nor a sound, that
betokened a gathering.

"I wouldn't wonder now if it was a lie of Sam Wylie's, and the French
wasn't here at all," said he to himself; "'tis often I heerd that
Hemsworth could have the rebellion brake out whenever he liked it, and
sorra bit but that may be it now, just to pretend the French was here,
to get the boys out, and let the army at them."

This reflection of Kerry's was scarcely conceived, when it was
strengthened by a boy who was coming from Glengariff with a turf-car,
and who told him that the ships that came in with the morning's tide had
all weighed anchor, and sailed out of the Bay before twelve o'clock, and
that nobody knew anything about them, what they were, and whence from.
"We thought they were the French," said the boy, "till we seen them
sailing away; but then we knew it wasn't them, and some said it was the
King's ships coming in to guard Bantry."

"And they are not there now?" said Kerry.

"Not one of them; they're out to say, and out of sight, this hour back."

Kerry hesitated for a second or two, whether this intelligence might
not entitle him to turn homeward; but a second thought--the priest's
kitchen--seemed to have the advantage, and thither he bent his steps
accordingly.

CHAPTER XLVI. THE PRIEST'S COTTAGE.

When Mark and Herbert separated on the mountain, each took a different
path downward. Mark, bent on assembling the people at once, and
proclaiming the arrival of their friends, held his course towards
Glengariff and the coast, where the fishermen were, to a man, engaged in
the plot. Herbert, uncertain how t