At the place, close to the Dead Mans 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 tury. 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 ser crept over the bay frhley, it was his busio hang a horn lanthorn in the southern window, that the news might travel to Dorrens Island, and from thence, by another horn lanthorn, to the village of the Rosses. But for this glimmering of messages, he had little union 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 ey, 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 dahitening the east, and that the ser would not dare to round Roughley and e to an anchor after daybreak; when he saw a long line of herons flying slowly from Dorrens Island and towards the pools which lie, half choked with reeds, behind what is called the Sed Rosses. He had never before seen herons flying over the sea, for they are shore?keeping birds, and partly because this had startled him out of his drowsiness, and more because the long delay of the ser kept his cupboard empty, he took down his rusty shot?gun, of which the barrel was tied on with a piece of string, and followed them towards the pools.
When he came close enough to hear the sighing of the rushes iermost pool, the m was grey over the world, so that the tall rushes, the still waters, the vague clouds, the thin mists lying among the sand?heaps, seemed carved out of an enormous pearl. In a little he came upon the herons, of whom there were a great number, standing with lifted legs in the shallow water; and croug down behind a bank of rushes, looked to the priming of his gun, a for a moment over his rosary to murmur: Patron Patrick, let me shoot a heron; made into a pie it will support me for nearly four days, for I no longer eat as in my youth. If you keep me from missing I will say a rosary to you every night until the pie is eaten. Then he lay down, and, resting his gun upon a large stourowards a heron which stood upon a bank of smooth grass over a little stream that flowed into the pool; for he feared to take the rheumatism by wading, as he would have to do if he shot one of those which stood ier. But when he looked along the barrel the heron was gone, and, to his wonder and terror, a man of infinitely great age and infirmity stood in its place. He lowered the gun, and the heron stood there with bent head and motionless feathers, as though it had slept from the beginning of the world. He raised the gun, and no sooner did he look along the iron than that enemy of all entment brought the old man again before him, only to vanish when he lowered the gun for the sed time. He laid the gun down, and crossed himself three times, and said a Paternoster and an Ave Maria, and muttered half aloud: Some enemy of God and of my patron is standing upon the smooth plad fishing in the blessed water,
and then aimed very carefully and slowly. He fired, and when the s