As they approached the churchyard gate they met two young women covered with blood, who were running shrieking along the road, and shortly after an elderly man so much injured, that he was creeping for support along the wall. “Go on,” he said to the widow, who had stopped to assist him; “I have gotten my life as a ransom, but there are hundreds perishing yonder.” They entered the churchyard; two-thirds of the roof had fallen, and nearly half the people were buried in the ruins; and they could see through the shattered windows men all covered with blood and dust, yelling, like maniacs, and tearing up the stones and slates that were heaped over their wives and children. As the sufferers were carried out one by one, and laid on the flat tombstones of the churchyard, the widow, so strangely restored to the energies of her better years, busied herself in stanching their wounds, or restoring them to animation; and her daughter, gathering heart, strove to assist her. A young man came staggering from among the ruins, his face suffused with blood, and bearing a dead body on his shoulders, when, laying down his charge beside them, he sunk over it in a swoon. It was the young cousin of the maiden, and the mutilated corpse which he carried was that of his father. She sobbed over him in an agony of grief and terror; but the exertions of the widow, who wonderfully retained her self-possession, soon recovered him to consciousness, though in so weak a state from exhaustion and loss of blood, that some time elapsed ere he was able to quit the burying-ground, leaning on the arm of his cousin. Thirty-six persons were killed on the spot, and many more were so dreadfully injured that they never recovered. The tombstones were spread over with dead bodies, some of them so fearfully gashed and mangled that they could scarce be recognised, and the paths that wended throughout the churchyard literally ran with blood. It was not until the maiden had reached her mother’s cottage, and the heart-rending clamour had begun to fall more faintly on the ear, that she thought of the mysterious washing of Loch-Slin, with its bloody shirts, and felt that she could understand it.