51�Թ�

I select a rock, slightly bigger than my hand, and tie it to the rope’s end.

Looping the rope’s end around the old water-butt that had been the ferret’s drum, she sprang inside, calling up to the parapet, “Haul away, Constance.”

Matthias dangled on the rope’s end for a moment, then he started to slip slowly down.

On one occasion, when Dad blamed missing a mooring on general inefficiency and picked up a merrie rope’s end to inflict merrie mass punishment, the entire crew leaped simultaneously over the side in an unrehearsed abandon-ship maneuver.

The merrie rope’s end was no idle threat.