Half an hour later Dan Mylrea, with swimming eyes and a big heart, was walking toward the Deemster at Ballamona. The flush of the sun newly risen, and the brighter glory of a great hope newly born, was on his worn and pallid cheek. What terrors had life for him now? It had none. And very soon death also would lose its sting. Atonement! atonement! It was even as he had thought: a wasted life for a life well spent, the life of a bad man for the life of a good one, but all he had to give--all, all! And when he came to lay his offering at the merciful Father's feet it would not be spurned. CHAPTER XXVI HOW EWAN CAME TO CHURCH It is essential to the progress of this history that we should leave Dan where he now is, in the peace of a great soul newly awakened, and go back to the beginning of this Christmas Day on shore. The parish of Michael began that day with all its old observances. While the dawn of Christmas morning was struggling but feebly with the night of Christmas-eve a gang of the baser sort went out with lanterns and long sticks into the lanes, there to whoop and beat the bushes. It was their annual hunting of the wren. Before the parish had sat down to its Christmas breakfast two of these lusty enemies of the tiny bird were standing in the street of the village with a long pole from shoulder to shoulder and a wee wren suspended from the middle of it. Their brave companions gathered round and plucked a feather from the wren's breast now and again. At one side of the company, surrounded by a throng of children, was Hommy-beg, singing a carol, and playing his own accompaniment on his fiddle. The carol told a tragic story of an evil spirit in the shape of a woman who pestered the island in the old days, of how the people rose up against her to drive her into the sea, and of how she turned herself into a wren, and all on the holy day of the blessed Saint Stephen. A boy whose black eyes danced with a mischievous twinkle held a crumpled paper upside down before the gardener, and from this inverted text and score the unlettered cox-comb pretended to play and sing. The women came to their doors to listen, and the men with their two hands in their breeches-pockets leaned against the ends of their houses and smoked and looked on sleepily. When the noisy crowd had passed, the street sank back to its customary repose, broken only by the voice of a child--a little auburn-haired lassie, in a white apron tucked up in fish-wife fashion--crying, "Shrimps, fine shrimps, fresh shrimps!" and then by a lustier voice that drowned the little lassie's tones, and cried, "Conger--conger eel--fine, ladies--fresh, ladies--and bellies as big as bishops! Conger eel--conger!"