“I think so too,” said Martin, searching about for small twigs and drift-wood with which to make a fire.  “There is no saying what sort of wild beasts may be in the forest, so we had better wait till daylight.”

A fire was quickly lighted by means of the pistol-flint and a little dry grass, which, when well bruised and put into the pan, caught a spark after one or two attempts, and was soon blown into a flame.  But no wood large enough to keep the fire burning for any length of time could be found; so Barney said he would go up to the forest and fetch some.  “I’ll lave my shoes and socks, Martin, to dry at the fire.  See ye don’t let them burn.”

Traversing the meadow with hasty strides, the bold sailor quickly reached the edge of the forest, where he began to lop off several dead branches from the trees with his cutlass.  While thus engaged the howl which had formerly startled him was repeated.  “Av I only knowed what ye was,” muttered Barney in a serious tone, “it would be some sort o’ comfort.”

A loud cry of a different kind here interrupted his soliloquy, and soon after the first cry was repeated louder than before.

Clenching his teeth and knitting his brows the perplexed Irishman resumed his work with a desperate resolve not to be again interrupted.  But he had miscalculated the strength of his nerves.  Albeit as brave a man as ever stepped, when his enemy was before him, Barney was, nevertheless, strongly imbued with superstitious feelings; and the conflict between his physical courage and his mental cowardice produced a species of wild exasperation, which, he often asserted, was very hard to bear.  Scarcely had he resumed his work when a bat of enormous size brushed past his nose so noiselessly that it seemed more like a phantom than a reality.  Barney had never seen anything of the sort before, and a cold perspiration broke out upon him, when he fancied it might be a ghost.  Again the bat swept past close to his eyes.

“Musha, but I’ll kill ye, ghost or no ghost,” he ejaculated, gazing all round into the gloomy depths of the woods with his cutlass uplifted.  Instead of flying again in front of him, as he had expected, the bat flew with a whirring noise past his ear.  Down came the cutlass with a sudden thwack, cutting deep into the trunk of a small tree, which trembled under the shock and sent a shower of ripe nuts of a large size down upon the sailor’s head.  Startled as he was, he sprang backward with a wild cry; then, half ashamed of his groundless fears, he collected the wood he had cut, threw it hastily on his shoulder and went with a quick step out of the woods.  In doing so he put his foot upon the head of a small snake, which wriggled up round his ankle and leg.  If there was anything on earth that Barney abhorred and dreaded it was a snake.  No sooner did he feel its cold form writhing under his foot, than he uttered a tremendous yell of terror, dropped his bundle of sticks, and fled precipitately to the beach, where he did not hall till he found himself knee-deep in the sea.