descends from the mountains in vicious squalls. It catches rushing tides
at baffling angles and lashes them into white-lipped fury. Sturdy island
boats of the larger size, boats with bluff bows and bulging sides, brave
it under their smallest lugs. But lesser boats, and especially light
pleasure crafts like the _Tortoise_ do well to lie snug at their
moorings till the southeasterly wind has spent its strength.

CHAPTER XX

Timothy Sweeny, J. P., as suited a man of portly figure and civic
dignity, was accustomed to lie long in his bed of a morning. On weekdays
he rose, in a bad temper, at nine o'clock. On Sundays, when he washed
and shaved, he was half an hour later and his temper was worse. An
apprentice took down the shutters of the shop on weekdays at half past
nine. By that time Sweeny, having breakfasted, sworn at his wife and
abused his children, was ready to enter upon the duties of his calling.

On the morning after the thunderstorm he was wakened at the outrageous
hour of half past seven by the rattle of a shower of pebbles against his
window. The room he slept in looked out on the back-yard through which
his Sunday customers were accustomed to make their way to the bar.
Sweeny turned over in his bed and cursed. The window panes rattled
again under another shower of gravel. Sweeny shook his wife into
consciousness. He bade her get up and see who was in the back-yard.
Mrs. Sweeny, a lean harassed woman with grey hair, fastened a dingy pink
nightdress round her throat with a pin and obeyed her master.

"It's Peter Walsh," she said, after peering out of the window.

"Tell him to go to hell out of that," said Sweeny.

Mrs. Sweeny wrapped a shawl round her shoulders, opened the bottom of
the window and translated her husband's message.

"Himself's asleep in his bed," she said, "but if you'll step into the
shop at ten o'clock he'll be glad to see you."

"I'll be obliged to you, ma'am," said Peter Walsh, "if you'll wake him,
for what I'm wanting to say to him is particular and he'll be sorry
after if there's any delay about hearing it."

"Will you shut that window and have done talking," said Sweeny from
the bed. "There's a draught coming in this minute that would lift the
feathers from a goose."

Mrs. Sweeny, though an oppressed woman, was not wanting in spirit. She
gave Peter Walsh's message in a way calculated to rouse and irritate her
husband.

"He says that if you don't get up out of that mig