which was different from anything that had
ever sailed upon the waters or below them, or, for the matter of that,
above them.

To the right hand there was a rough, but absolutely accurate, copy of
this same craft leaving the water and flying into the air, and just
underneath this a tiny sketch of a flying fish doing the same thing.

The man sitting before the drawing-board was an Irishman. He was one of
those men with the strong, crisp hair, black brows and deep brown eyes,
straight, strong nose almost in a line with his forehead, thin, nervous
lips and pointed jaw, strong at the angles but weak at the point, which
come only from one descent.

Nearly four hundred years before, one of the ships of the great Armada
had been wrecked on Achill Island, about twenty miles from where he sat.
Half a dozen or so of the crew had been saved, and one of these was a
Spanish gentleman, captain of Arquebusiers who, drenched and bedraggled
as he was when the half-wild Irish fishermen got him out of the water,
still looked what he was, a Hidalgo of Spain. He had been nursed back to
health and strength in a miserable mud and turf-walled cottage, and,
broken in fortune--for he was one of the many gentlemen of Spain who had
risked their all on the fortunes of King Philip and the Great Armada,
and lost--he refused to go back to his own country a beaten man.

And meanwhile he had fallen in love with the daughter of his nurse, the
wife of the fisherman who had taken him more than half dead out of the
raging Atlantic surf.

No man ever knew who he was, save that he was a gentleman, a Spaniard,
and a Catholic. But when he returned to the perfection of physical and
mental health, and had married the grey-eyed, dark-browed girl, who had
seemed to him during his long hours of sickness the guardian angel who
had brought him back across the line which marks the frontier between
life and death, he developed an extraordinary talent in boat-building,
which was the real origin of the wonderful sea-worthiness of small
craft which to this day brave, almost with impunity, the terrible seas
which, after an unbroken run of almost two thousand miles, burst upon
the rock-bound, island-fenced coast of Connemara.

The man at the table was the descendant in the sixth generation of the
unknown Spanish Hidalgo, who nearly four hundred years before had said
in reply to a question as to what his name was:

"Juan de Castillano."

As the generations had passed