There was a waggish drollery in the way he said this that by no means reassured her, but taking his hand, she walked down to the beach beside him, telling him to be careful of himself, and do nothing rash, and to mind what Tom Maher said, and, above all, to remember he was the last of the family, and if anything was to happen to him there was an end of the name for ever. “And don’t you think, Molly, that the world would continue to go round, even if it lost us, great as we are?” “Ah, ye’re a young imp! that’s what ye are;” said she, wiping a tear from her eye as she spoke. “‘Tis wishin’ them well I am, the same clothes. I’d rather see you in a suit of sealskin, than sent out on such a day as this, just to be measured by a tailor.” “You’d dress me worse than Brian O’Lynn, Molly,” said the boy, with a merry laugh. “Did you ever hear what he did for a watch?” “Arrah! what do I care what he did.” “Here it is, and very ingenious, too,” said he: “Bryan O’Lynn had no watch to put on, So he scooped out a turnip to make him a one, He then put a cricket clean under the skin, ‘They’ll think it is ticking,’ says Bryan O’Lynn.” “May I never!” began she, trying to reprove his levity; but as he stepped into the boat at the same instant, her grief overcame all else, and she burst into tears. She threw her apron over her face to hide her emotion; but she suddenly drew it down as a wild cry, half yell, half cheer, broke from the fishermen on the shore; a squall had struck the boat just as she got under weigh, and though she lay over, reeling under the shock, she righted nobly again, and stood out boldly to sea. “There’s not a finer craft in the King’s navy,” said a very old man, who had once been a pilot. “I’d not be afeerd to go to ‘Quaybeck’ in her.” “Come up and taste a dhrop of sperits this wet day,” whispered Molly in his ear, for his words were a balm to her aching heart. At first from the window of his lonely room, and then, when the boat had rounded the point of land, and could be no more seen, from a little loopholed slit in the tower above him, Luttrell watched her course. Even with his naked eye he could mark the sheets of spray as they broke over the bow and flew across her, and see how the strong mast bent like a whip, although she was reduced to her very shortest sail, and was standing under a double-reefed mainsail, and a small storm-jib. Not another boat, not another sail of any kind was to be seen; and there seemed something heroically daring in that little barque, that one dark speck, as it rose and plunged, seen and lost alternately in the rolling sea.