e of their revelries.
It is an inn now. The walls seem to echo to their voices. But the tables
they ate at are like themselves--worm-eaten.

Good-bye to them! They have gone over the Styx.

SMUGGLING AND WRECKING

Meanwhile, what of the Manx people? Their condition was pitiful. An
author who wrote fifty years after the advent of the Athols gives a
description of such misery that one's flesh creeps as one reads it.
Badly housed, badly clad, badly fed, and hardly taught at all, the very
poor were in a state of abjectness unfit for dogs. Treat men as dogs and
they speedily acquire the habits of dogs, the vices of dogs, and none of
their virtues. That was what happened to a part of the Manx people; they
developed the instincts of dogs, while their masters, the other dogs,
the gay dogs, were playing their bad game together. Smuggling became
common on the coasts of Man. Spirits and tobacco were the goods chiefly
smuggled, and the illicit trade rose to a great height. There was no
way to check it. The island was an independent kingdom. My lord of Athol
swept in the ill-gotten gains, and his people got what they could. It
was a game of grab. Meantime the trade of the surrounding countries,
England, Wales, and Ireland, was suffering grievously. The name of the
island must have smelt strong in those days.

But there was a fouler odour than that of smuggling. Wrecking was not
unknown. The island lent itself naturally to that evil work. The mists
of Little Mannanan, son of Lear, did not forsake our island when Saint
Patrick swept him out of it. They continued to come up from the south,
and to conspire with the rapid currents from the north to drive ships on
to our rocks. Our coasts were badly lighted, or lighted not at all. An
open flare stuck out from a pole at the end of a pier was often all
that a dangerous headland had to keep vessels away from it. Nothing was
easier than for a fishing smack to run down pole and flare together, as
if by accident, on returning to harbour. But there was a worse danger
than bad lights, and that was false lights. It was so easy to set them.
Sometimes they were there of themselves, without evil intention of any
human soul, luring sailors to their destruction. Then when ships came
ashore it was so easy to juggle with one's conscience and say it was the
will of God, and no bad doings of any man's. The poor sea-going men were
at the bottom of the sea by this time, and their cargo was drifting up