een long at sea. They went up to the back
of the cliff, and came upon its high grassy top; the road led through
where small houses were thickly clustered on either side. Caius looked
for candle, or fire, or human being, and saw none, and they had not
travelled far along the street of this lifeless village when he saw that
the road led on down the other side of the headland, and that the beach
and the dune stretched ahead of them exactly as they stretched behind.

"Is this a village of the dead?" he asked O'Shea.

The man O'Shea seemed to have in him some freak of perverseness which
made it hard for him to answer the simplest question. It was almost by
force that Caius got from him the explanation that the village was only
used during certain fishing seasons, and abandoned during the
winter--unless, indeed, its houses were broken into by shipwrecked
sailors, whose lives depended upon finding means of warmth.

The cart descended from the cliff by the same sandy road, and the pony
again trotted upon the beach; its trot was deceptive, for it had the
appearance of making more way than it did. On they went--on, on, over
this wonderful burnished highroad which the sea and the moonlight had
laid for their travel. Behind and before, look as they would, they could
see only the weird white hills of sand, treeless, almost shadowless now,
the seahorses foaming and plunging in endless line, and between them the
road, whose apparent narrowing in the far perspective was but an emblem
of the truth that the waves were encroaching upon it inch by inch.

CHAPTER V.

DEVILRY.

When the cart and its little company had travelled for almost another
hour, a dark object in the midst of the line of foam caught their sight.
It was the boy who first saw it, and he suddenly leaned forward,
clutching O'Shea's arm as if in fear.

The man looked steadily.

"She's come in since we passed here before."

The boy apparently said something, although Caius could not catch the
voice.

"No," said O'Shea; "there's cargo aboard of her yit, but the men are off
of her."

It was a black ship that, sailless and with masts pitifully aslant, was
fixed on the sand among the surf, and the movement of the water made her
appear to labour forward as if in dying throes making effort to reach
the shore.

The boy seemed to scan the prospect before him now far more eagerly than
before; but the wreck, which was, as O'Shea said, deserted, seemed to be
the