“But see,” remarked the younger, “that there be no unwillingness on the other side. I am much mistaken if that be not the boat of my cousins the Macinlas! Hap what may, however, the night is getting worse, and we have no choice of quarters. Hard up your helm, father, or we shall barely clear the Skerries;--there now--every nail an anchor!” He leaped ashore, carrying with him the small hawser attached to the stem, known technically as the _swing_, which he wound securely round a jutting crag, and then stood for a few seconds until the old man, who moved but heavily along the thwarts, had come up to him. All was comparatively calm under the lee of the precipices; but the wind was roaring fearfully in the woods above, and whistling amid the furze and ivy of the higher cliffs; and the two boatmen as they entered the cave could see the flakes of a thick snow-shower, that had just begun to descend, circling round and round in the eddy. The place was occupied by three men--two of them young, and rather ordinary-looking persons; the third, a greyheaded old man, apparently of great muscular strength, though long past his prime, and of a peculiarly sinister cast of countenance. A keg of spirits, which was placed before them, served as a table. There were little drinking-measures of tin on it; and the mask-like, stolid expressions of the two younger men, showed that they had been indulging freely. The elder was comparatively sober. A fire, composed mostly of fragments of wreck and drift wood, threw up its broad cheerful flame towards the roof; but so spacious was the cavern, that, except where here and there a whiter mass of stalactites, or bolder projection of cliff, stood out from the darkness, the light seemed lost in it. A dense body of smoke, which stretched its blue level surface from side to side, and concealed the roof, went rolling onwards like an inverted river. On the entrance of the fishermen, the three boatmen within started to their feet, and one of the younger, laying hold of the little cask, pitched it hurriedly into a dark corner of the cave. “Ay, ye do well to hide it, Gibbie!” exclaimed the savage-looking old man in a bitter ironical tone, as he recognised the intruders; “here are your good friends, William and Ernest Beth come to see if they cannot rob and maltreat us a second time. Well! they had better try.”