The wood grew thinner and thinner, and the ground began to slope up toward the mountain.  The moon had already set, and the little white flames of the stars had come out everywhere.  The ground sloped more and more until at last they rode far above the woods upon the wide top of the mountain.  The woods lay spread out mile after mile below, and away to the south shot up the red glare of the burning town.  But before and above them were the little white flames.  The guide drew rein suddenly, and pointing upwards with the hand that did not hold the torch, shrieked out, ‘Look; look at the holy candles!’ and then plunged forward at a gallop, waving the torch hither and thither.  ’Do you hear the hoofs of the messengers?’ cried the guide.  ’Quick, quick! or they will be gone out of your hands!’ and he laughed as with delight of the chase.  The troopers thought they could hear far off, and as if below them, rattle of hoofs; but now the ground began to slope more and more, and the speed grew more headlong moment by moment.  They tried to pull up, but in vain, for the horses seemed to have gone mad.  The guide had thrown the reins on to the neck of the old white horse, and was waving his arms and singing a wild Gaelic song.  Suddenly they saw the thin gleam of a river, at an immense distance below, and knew that they were upon the brink of the abyss that is now called Lug-na-Gael, or in English the Stranger’s Leap.  The six horses sprang forward, and five screams went up into the air, a moment later five men and horses fell with a dull crash upon the green slopes at the foot of the rocks.

THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT.

At the place, close to the Dead Man’s Point, at the Rosses, where the disused pilot-house looks out to sea through two round windows like eyes, a mud cottage stood in the last century.  It also was a watchhouse, for a certain old Michael Bruen, who had been a smuggler in his day, and was still the father and grandfather of smugglers, lived there, and when, after nightfall, a tall schooner crept over the bay from Roughley, it was his business to hang a horn lanthorn in the southern window, that the news might travel to Dorren’s Island, and from thence, by another horn lanthorn, to the village of the Rosses.  But for this glimmering of messages, he had little communion with mankind, for he was very old, and had no thought for anything but for the making of his soul, at the foot of the Spanish crucifix of carved oak that hung by his chimney, or bent double over the rosary of stone beads brought to him a cargo of silks and laces out of France.  One night he had watched hour after hour, because a gentle and favourable wind was blowing, and La Mere de Misericorde was much overdue; and he was about to lie down upon his heap of straw, seeing that the dawn was whitening the east, and that the schooner would not dare to round Roughley and come to an anchor after daybreak;