“Ay, sir. Multiplying and raising them. The story goes that these fellows drink the minister’s health first, in every keg they open; and the saying is, that if the seditious do as they say,—pull the minister’s carriage about his ears some day,—he will have a guard of smugglers rise up of their own accord to bear him harmless. But they don’t like the talk of an income tax, sir.” “It is no longer mere talk. The assessment has begun.” “Sure, sir, it has. And that may have made them desperate in their daring, which their coming here looks like. But they could not have chosen their night better. ’Tis a wonder to me how any body could watch them. Fudge! What are they after now?” A struggle ended in making the torch more efficacious than was contemplated. A smuggler staved a cask. Whether by accident or design was never known,—but the torch dropped into the rivulet of spirit, and it turned to fire. The blue flame shot up, waved, hovered, looked very beautiful in itself, but cast a fearful light on the brawlers who rushed over one another to extricate their shins from the flame. Jane saw a really grim face at last. A man in a prodigious rage had been fighting with the brown-coated smuggler who was like Michael. The angry man had got the better of the other, and was now lifting him up at arms length, with the strength of an elephant, and the ferocity of a tiger. He dashed him down with a sound that was heard through the din. “It _is_ Michael!” cried the brother and sister at the same moment. They had both seen his face high in the air. They burst through the throng, and reached the body,—the dead body; for the neck was broken against a cask. As Jane kneeled beside him, in front of the flickering blaze, she replaced the head, horribly bent backwards as it was, and then looked up in Henry’s face with kindled eyes, to say, “He is gone; and he is not married. He is gone this time.” CHAPTER V. HOW TO ENTERTAIN STRANGERS. It was long before Henry could get back. He had to convey Jane home, and recover her to a safer state of mind, and then to communicate the intelligence to Patience; and then,—more painful still,—to the young woman whom he always regarded as Michael’s wife. At the end of four hours, when it was nearly one in the morning, he knocked at the door of his lodgings, and was instantly let in by his landlord. He perceived that Mr. Price looked very sulky; and he could obtain no answer to his enquiries about whether Mrs. Farrer had been uneasy at his not returning. He bounded up stairs, and Marie was in his arms before he saw how pale was her face, and how swollen her eyes. The fire burned dull, the lamp only glimmered, and there was an air of indescribable confusion in the room; so that, occupied as Henry was with what had happened, he could not help feeling almost bewildered as to whether this was his lodging or not. “I thought you never, never would have come,” sobbed Marie.