They were gone like a dream.

And the wind still ran and shouted, and the senseless waters in the Roost still leaped and tumbled as before.
How long we lay there together, we three, speechless and motionless, is more than I can tell, but it must have been for long.

At length, one by one, and almost mechanically, we crawled back into the shelter of the bank.

As I lay against the parapet, wholly wretched and not entirely master of my mind, I could hear my kinsman maundering to himself in an altered and melancholy mood.

Now he would repeat to himself with maudlin iteration, 'Sic a fecht as they had--sic a sair fecht as they had, puir lads, puir lads!' and anon he would bewail that 'a' the gear was as gude's tint,' because the ship had gone down among the Merry Men instead of stranding on the shore; and throughout, the name--the _Christ-Anna_--would come and go in his divagations, pronounced with shuddering awe.