"They call me Billy the Bees," he said, "because I catch them and rear them--look," and he pointed to his hives. He talked of his three dogs and named them, saying that they slept in a sack together, and that in the same sack he slept with them. Something he said of the cold that had been coming latterly, and pointed to the soot on his breast, saying that it kept him warm. He told how he made a circuit of the farmhouses once a week, dancing and singing at all of them, and how the people gave him barley-meal and eggs. Much more he said, but because the method of it--where method there was any--has gone from my memory I pass it. That the world was night about its end he knew of a surety, because he saw that if a man had money and great store of gear it mattered not what else he wanted. These with other such words he spoke ramblingly, and I stood aside and answered him nothing, neither did I look up into his face. At last he said, timidly, "I know I have always been weak in my intellects," and hearing that, I could bear to hear no more, but went about my business with a great weight of trouble upon me. And "O God," I cried that night in my agony, "I am an ignorant sot, without the grace of human tenderness, or the gift of understanding. I am guilty before Thee, and no man careth for my soul, but from this affliction, O Almighty Master save me; save me from this degradation, for it threatens me, and when death comes that stands at the foot of life's awful account, I will pay its price with thankfulness." Now, after this meeting with the witless man the weariness that I had felt of my home on the sea lay the heavier on my spirits, and I concluded with myself that I should forsake my boat and build me a home on the land within sight of man's habitation. So I walked the cliffs from the Mull Hills to the Noggin Head, and at last I lit on the place I looked for. Near to the land where I had lately broken the fallows and grown me a crop of corn and potatoes, there were four roofless walls. Some time a house had stood there, but being built on the brink of the great clefts in the earth that we call the Chasms, it had shrunken in some settlement of the ground. This had affrighted the poor souls who inhabited it, and they had left it to fall into ruins. Such was the tale I heard long afterward, but none came near it then, and none have come near to it since. Save the four bare walls, and a wall that crossed it midway, nothing was left. Where the floor had been the grass was growing; wormwood was in the settle nook, and whinberries had ripened and rotted on the hearth. The door lintel was gone, and the sill of the window was fallen off. There was a round patch of long grass where the well had been, and near to where the porch once stood the trammon-tree still grew; and thus, though the good people who had lived and died there, been born and buried, were gone from it forever, the sign of their faith, or their superstition, lived after them.