of Ben Kyaw. Sheets of
mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces. All round the isle of
Aros the surf, with an incessant, hammering thunder, beat upon the reefs
and beaches. Now louder in one place, now lower in another, like the
combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass of sound was hardly
varied for a moment. And loud above all this hurly-burly I could hear
the changeful voices of the Roost and the intermittent roaring of the
Merry Men. At that hour, there flashed into my mind the reason of the
name that they were called. For the noise of them seemed almost
mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night; or if not
mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality. Nay, and it seemed
even human. As when savage men have drunk away their reason, and,
discarding speech, bawl together in their madness by the hour; so, to my
ears, these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the night.

Arm in arm, and staggering against the wind, Rorie and I won every yard
of ground with conscious effort. We slipped on the wet sod, we fell
together sprawling on the rocks. Bruised, drenched, beaten, and
breathless, it must have taken us near half an hour to get from the
house down to the Head that overlooks the Roost. There, it seemed, was
my uncle's favourite observatory. Right in the face of it, where the
cliff is highest and most sheer, a hump of earth, like a parapet, makes
a place of shelter from the common winds, where a man may sit in quiet
and see the tide and the mad billows contending at his feet. As he might
look down from the window of a house upon some street disturbance, so,
from this post, he looks down upon the tumbling of the Merry Men. On
such a night, of course, he peers upon a world of blackness, where the
waters wheel and boil, where the waves joust together with the noise of
an explosion, and the foam towers and vanishes in the twinkling of an
eye. Never before had I seen the Merry Men thus violent. The fury,
height, and transiency of their spoutings was a thing to be seen and not
recounted. High over our heads on the cliff rose their white columns in
the darkness; and the same instant, like phantoms, they were gone.
Sometimes three at a time would thus aspire and vanish; sometimes a gust
took them, and the spray would fall about us, heavy as a wave. And yet
the spectacle was rather maddening in its levity than impressive by its
force. Thought was beaten down by the confounding uproar; a gleeful