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.