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
vacancy possessed the brains of men, a state akin to madness; and I found
myself at times following the dance of the Merry Men as it were a tune
upon a jigging instrument.

I first caught sight of my uncle when we were still some yards away in
one of the flying glimpses of twilight that chequered the pitch darkness
of the night. He was standing up behind the parapet, his head thrown
back and the bottle to his mouth. As he put it down, he