incessant, hammering thunder, beat upon the reefs and beaches. Now
louder in one place, now lower in another, like the combinations of
orchestral music, the constant mass of sound was hardly varied for
a moment. And loud above all this hurly-burly I could hear the
changeful voices of the Roost and the intermittent roaring of the
Merry Men. At that hour, there flashed into my mind the reason of
the name that they were called. For the noise of them seemed
almost mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night; or
if not mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality. Nay,
and it seemed even human. As when savage men have drunk away their
reason, and, discarding speech, bawl together in their madness by
the hour; so, to my ears, these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in
the night.

Arm in arm, and staggering against the wind, Rorie and I won every
yard of ground with conscious effort. We slipped on the wet sod,
we fell together sprawling on the rocks. Bruised, drenched,
beaten, and breathless, it must have taken us near half an hour to
get from the house down to the Head that overlooks the Roost.
There, it seemed, was my uncle's favourite observatory. Right in
the face of it, where the cliff is highest and most sheer, a hump
of earth, like a parapet, makes a place of shelter from the common
winds, where a man may sit in quiet and see the tide and the mad
billows contending at his feet. As he might look down from the
window of a house upon some street disturbance, so, from this post,
he looks down upon the tumbling of the Merry Men. On such a night,
of course, he peers upon a world of blackness, where the waters
wheel and boil, where the waves joust together with the noise of an
explosion, and the foam towers and vanishes in the twinkling of an
eye. Never before had I seen the Merry Men thus violent. The