ked, with a smile,
"during the progress of this great undertaking:'"

"That's the worst of you, Jack," my father cried petulantly. "There is
nothing practical about you. Instead of confining your attention to the
working out of my noble scheme, you begin raising all sorts of absurd
objections. It is a mere matter of detail how our descendants live, so
long as they stick to the Djarmas. Now, I want you to go up to the bothy
of Fergus McDonald and see about the thatch, and Willie Fullerton has
written to say that his milk-cow is bad. You might took in upon your way
and ask after it."

I started off upon my errands, but before doing so I took a look at the
barometer upon the wall. The mercury had sunk to the phenomenal point
of twenty-eight inches. Clearly the old sailor had not been wrong in his
interpretation of Nature's signs.

As I returned over the moors in the evening, the wind was blowing in
short, angry puffs, and the western horizon was heaped with sombre
clouds which stretched their long, ragged tentacles right up to the
zenith.

Against their dark background one or two livid, sulphur-coloured
splotches showed up malignant and menacing, while the surface of the
sea had changed from the appearance of burnished quicksilver to that of
ground glass. A low, moaning sound rose up from the ocean as if it knew
that trouble was in store for it.

Far out in the Channel I saw a single panting, eager steam vessel making
ifs way to Belfast Lough, and the large barque which I had observed in
the morning still beating about in the offing, endeavouring to pass to
the northward.

At nine o'clock a sharp breeze was blowing, at ten it had freshened into
a gale, and before midnight the most furious storm was raging which I
can remember upon that weather-beaten coast.

I sat for some time in our small, oak-panelled sitting-room listening to
the screeching and howling of the blast and to the rattle of the gravel
and pebbles as they pattered against the window. Nature's grim orchestra
was playing its world-old piece with a compass which ranged from
the deep diapason of the thundering surge to the thin shriek of the
scattered shingle and the keen piping of frightened sea birds.

Once for an instant I opened the lattice window, but a gust of wind and
rain came blustering through, bearing with it a great sheet of seaweed,
which flapped down upon the table. It was all I could do to close it
again with a thrust of my shoulder in t