lls, the women with their
drugget shawls drawn over their heads, the men with their frieze coats
hanging loose about them. The chill mist which clung to the hillsides,
and the atmosphere of doubt which overhung all, were a poor exchange
for the roaring bonfires, the good cheer, the enthusiasm, the merriment
of the previous evening. But the Irish peasant, if he be less staunch
at the waiting--even as he is more forward in the hand-to-hand than his
Scottish cousins--has the peasant's gift of endurance; and in the most
trying hours--in ignorance, in doubt, in danger--has often held his
ground in dependence on his betters, with a result pitiful in the
reading. For too often the great have abandoned the little, the horse
has borne off the rider, and the naked footman, surprised, surrounded,
out-matched, and put to the sword, has paid for all.

But on this day a time came, about high noon, when the assemblage--and
the fog--began at last to melt. Sir Donny was gone, and old Tim Burke
of Maamtrasna. They had slipped homewards, by little-known tracks
across the peat hags; and, shamefaced and fearful of the consequences,
the spirit all gone out of them, had turned their minds to oaths and
alibis. They had been in trouble before, and were taken to know; and
their departure sapped the O'Beirnes' resolution, whose uneasy faces as
they talked together spread the contagion. Uncle Ulick and several of
the buckeens were away on the search; the handful of Spanish seamen had
returned to the house or to the ship: there was no one to check the
defection when it set in. An hour after Sir Donny had slipped away, the
movement which might have meant so much to so many was spent. The
slopes about the ruined gables which they called Carraghalin, and which
were all that remained of the once proud abbey, had returned to their
wonted solitude; where hundreds had sat a short hour before the eagle
hovered, the fox turned his head and scented the wind. Even the house
at Morristown had so far become itself again that a scarcity, rather
than a plenitude of life, betrayed the past night of orgy; and a
quietness beyond the ordinary, the things that had been dreamed. The
garrison of Tralee, the Protestant Settlement at Kenmare, facts which
had been held distant and negligible in the first flush of hope and
action, now seemed to the fearful fancy many an Irish mile nearer and
many a shade more real.

Doubtless, in the minds of some, a secret thankfulness th