, the name, as usual, had got modified, and
this man's name was John Castellan.

"I think that will about do for the present," he said, getting up from
the table and throwing his pencil down. "I've got it almost perfect
now;" and then as he bent down again over the table, and looked over
every line of his drawings, "Yes, it's about all there. I wonder what my
Lords of the British Admiralty would give to know what that means. Well,
God save Ireland, they shall some day!"

He unpinned the paper from the board, rolled it up, and put it into the
top drawer of an old oak cabinet, which one would hardly have expected
to find in such a room as that, and locked the drawer with a key on his
keychain. Then he took his cap from a peg on the door, and his gun from
the corner beside it, and went out.

There are three ways out of Clifden to the west, one to the southward
takes you over the old bridge, which arches the narrow rock-walled
gorge, which gathers up the waters of the river after they have had
their frolic over the rocks above. The other is a continuation of the
main street, and this, as it approaches the harbour, where you may now
see boats built on the pattern which John Castellan's ancestor had
designed, divides into two roads, one leading along the shore of the
bay, and the other, rough, stony, and ill-kept, takes you above the
coast-guard station, and leads to nowhere but the Atlantic Ocean.

Between these two roads lies in what was once a park, but which is now a
wilderness, Clifden Castle. Castle in Irish means country house, and
all over the south and west of Ireland you may find such houses as this
with doors screwed up, windows covered with planks, roofs and eaves
stripped of the lead and slates which once protected them from the
storms which rise up from the Atlantic, and burst in wind and rain, snow
and sleet over Connemara, long ago taken away to sell by the bankrupt
heirs of those who ruined themselves, mortgaged and sold every acre of
ground and every stick and stone they owned to maintain what they called
the dignity of their families at the Vice-Regal Court in Dublin.

John Castellan took the lower road, looking for duck. The old house had
been the home of his grandfather, but he had never lived in it. The ruin
had come in his father's time, before he had learned to walk. He looked
at it as he passed, and his teeth clenched and his brows came together
in a straight line.

Almost at the same moment tha