On one occasion, she and another girl and two young men went for a sail with an old fisherman they knew, who took them some distance up the coast in the direction of Kinsale. There had been a slight breeze when they started, but it dropped suddenly as they were tacking to come back home, and since the sails had to be taken down and oars used, both the young men volunteered to row. Their offer being accepted by the old fisherman, they pulled away steadily till they espied an old ship, so battered and worn away as to be little more than a mere shell, lying half in and half out of the water in a tiny cove. Then, as the weather was beautifully fine and no one was in a hurry to get home, it was proposed that they pull up to the wreck and examine it. The old fisherman demurred, but he was soon won over, and the two young men and Mrs Broderick's girl friend boarded the old hulk, leaving Mrs Broderick and the old fisherman in the boat. The shadows from the trees and rocks had already manifested themselves on the glistening shingles of the beach, and a glow, emanating from the rapidly rising moon and myriads of scintillating stars that every moment shone forth with increased brilliancy, showed up every object around them with startling distinctness. Always in her element in scenes of this description, Mrs Broderick was enjoying herself to the utmost. Leaning on the side of the boat and trailing one hand in the water, she drank in the fresh night air, redolent with the scent of flowers and ozone. She could hear her friends talking and laughing as they tried to steady themselves on the sloping boards of the old hulk; and presently, one of them, O'Connell, proposed that they should descend below deck and explore the cabins. Then their voices gradually grew fainter and fainter, until eventually all was still, save for the lapping of the sea against the sides of the boat, and the gentle ripple of the wavelets as they broke on the beach, and the occasional far-away barkings of a dog--noises that somehow seem to belong to summer more than to any other period of the year. Mrs Broderick's memory, awakened by these sounds, travelled back to past seasons, and she was depicting some of the old scenes over again, when all at once, from the wreck, from that side of it, so it seemed to her, that was partly under water, there rang out a series of the most appalling screams, just like the screams of a woman who had been suddenly pounced upon and either stabbed, or treated in some equally savage and violent manner. Mrs Broderick, of course, at once thought of her friend, Mary Rooney, and, clutching the boatman by the arm, she exclaimed: "The Saints above, it's Mary. They're murdering her."