“Brave, glorious girl!” he cried. “But to think of her--alone--alone out there, while I---- oh, what a poor weak fool I am! Here am I--here, looking out to the sea she is gone to battle with! Oh, God! oh, God! I must do something for her--I must--but what--what?” He cast himself down upon the heather that crawled from the slopes even to the road, and there he lay with his head buried in agony at the thought of his own impotence; while through the dark glen floated the wild, weird strain of the lament: “Why art thou gone from us, Soul of all beauty and joy?” CHAPTER VII. Hamlet. How chances it they travel? their residence, both in reputation and profit, was better both ways. Rosencrantz. I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation. Many, wearing rapiers, are afraid of goose-quills. What imports the nomination of this gentleman? Hamlet. |AWAY from the glens and the heather-clad mountains, from the blue loughs and their islands of arbutus, from the harp-music, and from the ocean-music which makes those who hear it ripe for revolt; away from the land whose life is the memory of ancient deeds of nobleness; away from the land that has given birth to more heroes than any nation in the world, the land whose inhabitants live in thousands in squalor and look out from mud windows upon the most glorious scenery in the world; away from all these one must now be borne. Upon the evening of the fourth day after the chanting of that lament by the bard O'Brian from the depths of Glenmara, the good steamship _Cardwell Castle_ was making its way down Channel with a full cargo and heavy mails for Madeira, St. Helena, and the Cape. It had left its port but a few hours and already the coast had become dim with distance. The red shoreway of the south-west was now so far away that the level rays of sunlight which swept across the water were not seen to shine upon the faces of the rocks, or to show where the green fields joined the brown moorland; the windmills crowning every height were not seen to be in motion.