Pat looked in the desired direction, but misapprehended the object to be the western sky, where an overblown fiery rose seemed to have scattered all its petals broadcast. “Sure, that’s on’y the sun settin’ red like,” he explained, indifferently, and would have resumed his excavations if he had not been seized and hustled half-way up the cliff before he could disengage his mind from his brigades and batteries. Both heads soon bobbed up over the edge without accident; for Pat climbed like a monkey when once he had grasped the situation. His grandmother’s attitude toward Joe McEvoy constrained her to receive him effusively as prey snatched from the foaming jaws of death; but it was out of Mrs. Fottrel’s pocket that a peppermint-drop came to sweetly seal his new lease of life. “And what are you after now, Mick?” she said, observing that, instead of drawing himself up to level ground, he stood poised on an uncomfortable perch, and looked back the steep way he had come. “I’m thinkin’ to slip down agin,” he said, “and see if be any manner of manes I could huroosha th’ ould baste round the rocks yonder. The wather mightn’t be altogither too deep there yit; at all evints, she’s between the divil and the deep say where she is now; it’s just a chanst.” “Sorra a much,” said Joe, disconsolately; “scarce worth breakin’ your bones after, any way.” “Bones, how are you? Sure, there’s no call to be breakin’ bones in the matter,” said Mick, beginning to descend. This was true enough, if he had minded what he was about; but then he did not. So far from it, he was saying to himself, “One ’ud ha’ thought now she might ha’ took a sort of pride in it,” when the bottom of the world seemed to drop away from under his feet, and his irrelevant meditations ended in a shattering thud down on the rocky pavement a long way below. He never heard the shouts and shrieks which the incident occasioned above his head. Once only he became dimly conscious of a quivering network of prismatic flashes, which he could not see through, and a booming throb in his ears, which made him murmur dazedly: “Wirra, I thought I’d got beyond hearin’ of them drums.” In another moment: “What’s took me?” he said, with a start. But the depths he sank among remain always dark and silent. Next day messengers from Tullykillagin told Mrs. Doherty that the Lord had “took” her son Mick, and that “he had gone out to say wid the tide, before they could get anybody to him, and there was no tellin’ where he might be swep’ up, if ever he came to shore at all.”