presently two men were crossing swords under the trees, and by-and-by one of them was left under the moonlight, with the shadow of the leaves playing on his white face. Poor gay dogs, they are dead! The page of their history is lost. Perhaps that is just as well. It must have been a dark page, maybe a little red too, even as blood runs red. You can see the scene of their revelries. It is an inn now. The walls seem to echo to their voices. But the tables they ate at are like themselves--worm-eaten. Good-bye to them! They have gone over the Styx. SMUGGLING AND WRECKING Meanwhile, what of the Manx people? Their condition was pitiful. An author who wrote fifty years after the advent of the Athols gives a description of such misery that one's flesh creeps as one reads it. Badly housed, badly clad, badly fed, and hardly taught at all, the very poor were in a state of abjectness unfit for dogs. Treat men as dogs and they speedily acquire the habits of dogs, the vices of dogs, and none of their virtues. That was what happened to a part of the Manx people; they developed the instincts of dogs, while their masters, the other dogs, the gay dogs, were playing their bad game together. Smuggling became common on the coasts of Man. Spirits and tobacco were the goods chiefly smuggled, and the illicit trade rose to a great height. There was no way to check it. The island was an independent kingdom. My lord of Athol swept in the ill-gotten gains, and his people got what they could. It was a game of grab. Meantime the trade of the surrounding countries, England, Wales, and Ireland, was suffering grievously. The name of the island must have smelt strong in those days.