enched with the dews as he stood up stiffly from Jack
Kinsella's grave, upon which he had been lying. It was close upon
dawn, and the moon was very low. He looked about him at the quietness.
Another man might have thought he had but dreamt it; not so Mike
Sheehan. He remembered with a fierce joy how he had flung the ghost
and how Ellen had been on his side. 'You're mine now, asthoreen,' he
said in a passionate apostrophe to her, 'and 'tis I could find it in
my heart to pity him that's lying there and has lost you. He was the
fair fighter ever and always, and now he'll acknowledge me for the
better man.' And then he added, as if to himself, 'Poor Jack! I wish
I'd flung him on the broken ground and not on the slippery grass. 'Tis
then I'd feel myself that I was the better man.'

VIII

THE SEA'S DEAD

In Achill it was dreary wet weather--one of innumerable wet summers
that blight the potatoes and blacken the hay and mildew the few oats
and rot the poor cabin roofs. The air smoked all day with rain mixed
with the fine salt spray from the ocean. Out of doors everything
shivered and was disconsolate. Only the bog prospered, basking its
length in water, and mirroring Croghan and Slievemore with the smoky
clouds incessantly wreathing about their foreheads, or drifting like
ragged wisps of muslin down their sides to the clustering cabins more
desolate than a deserted nest. Inland from the sheer ocean cliffs the
place seemed all bog; the little bits of earth the people had
reclaimed were washed back into the bog, the gray bents and rimy
grasses that alone flourished drank their fill of the water, and were
glad. There was a grief and trouble on all the Island. Scarce a cabin
in the queer straggling villages but had desolation sitting by its
hearth. It was only a few weeks ago that the hooker had capsized
crossing to Westport, and the famine that is always stalking
ghost-like in Achill was forgotten in the contemplation of new graves.
The Island was full of widows and orphans and bereaved old people;
there was scarce a window sill in Achill by which the banshee had not
cried.

Where all were in trouble there were few to go about with comfort.
Moya Lavelle shut herself up in the cabin her husband Patrick had
built, and dreed her weird alone. Of all the boys who had gone down
with the hooker none was finer than Patrick Lavelle. He was brown and
handsome, broad-shouldered and clever, and he had the good-humoured
smile an