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; when he saw a long line of herons flying slowly from
Dorren's Island and towards the pools which lie, half choked with
reeds, behind what is called the Second 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 schooner 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 in the
outermost pool, the morning 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 crouching down
behind a bank of rushes, looked to the priming of his gun, and bent
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 stone, turned towards 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,