"Shall Pyramus rejoice to see the wall that hides him from his Thisbe? or Hector leap at the trumpet which parts him from his Andromache? Mistress mine, in yonder rock shall I read my doom?" "Rather read us your ode, Sir Poet," said she. "It has had a stormy hatching, and should be a tempestuous outburst." "As indeed you shall find it, if I have your leave to rehearse it," said he. "I beg no greater favour," said she. Then the poet poured out this brave sonnet:-- "Go, grievous gales, your heads that heave, Ye foam-flaked furies of the wasty deep. Ye loud-tongued Tritons, wind and wave. Go fan my love where she doth sleep, And tell her, tell her in her ear Her Corydon sits sighing here. "The tempest stalks the stormy sea, The lightning leaps with lurid light, The glad gull calls from lea to lea, The whistling whirlwind fills the night; Bears each a message to my love, Whose stony heart I faint to move." "'Tis too short," said the maiden, "we shall be friends, I hope, long enough to hear more of it." "Meanwhile, Sir Poet," said Ludar, who chafed at these civilities, "go forward again, and keep the watch. Call if you spy aught, and keep your eyes well open." Fortune favoured us that day, as she had handled us roughly in the days before. The wind held good, and filled our slender canvas. The pilot's charts deceived not; nor did friend or enemy stand across our path. Before night we had swept round the rock and found the channel of the Forth, up which, on a favouring tide, we dropped quietly that evening; and at nightfall let go our anchor with grateful hearts, albeit weary bodies, in Leith Roads, where for a season the _Misericorde_ and we had rest from our labours. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. HOW WE BROUGHT THE MAIDEN TO HER FATHER'S HOUSE. A month later, Ludar and the maiden and I stood on a cliff in Cantire which overlooks the Irish coast. The September sun was dipping wrathfully on the distant Donegal heights, kindling, as he did so, the headlands of Antrim with a crimson glow. Below us, the Atlantic surged heavily and impatiently round the rugged Mull. Opposite--so near, it seemed we might almost shout across--loomed out, sheer from the sea, the huge cliff of Benmore, dwarfing the forelands on either hand, and looking, as we saw it then, anything but the Fair Head which people call it. Scarcely further, on our right, lapped in the lurid water, lay the sweet Isle of Raughlin, ablaze with heather, and resounding with its chorus of sea-birds. A finer scene you could scarce desire. A scene which one day, when the sun is high and the calm water blue, may glisten before you like a vision of heaven; or, on a wild black day of storm, may frown over at you like a prison wall of lost souls; or (as it seemed to-night), like the strange battlements of a wizard's castle, which, while you dread, you yet long to enter.