So we were due a day or two’s holiday. I felt like going to sea with the lobster fishers, but the time was unfortunate, for they were ‘making nothing of it’. They were fishing from beyond Ardnamurchan to well down the Sound of Mull, and one man, to whom we spoke, after a last fruitless round had taken all his creels home with him in despair.

The weather worsened, too, and the bay was soon filled with yachts. The Highland voices of the crews came across the water as they made all shipshape and here and there put out a second anchor. As we lay inactive in a downpour that lasted nearly two days, the sight of such wealth somehow became depressing. A thousand insignificant strokes etched the picture of contrasts. The island gulls were in great evidence; scavengers waiting for the buckets to be emptied. Whenever one dived by a yacht’s side, even at an empty match box, all the others were upon it. You could see their constant eager watchfulness lest they miss anything. A mute swan, also on the watch, would eat out of your hand. The black eye, snail-black boss on the beak, the reptile-like fringe at the sides of the mouth—a scavenger, too. Dependent on the tourist industry. I thought of the puffins and guillemots heading out of Loch Sunart in formation as of a life swift and clean and fearless.

An honest Glasgow voice told a story with simple wonder of an Islander who was so overwhelmed with pleasure when he saw his chieftain-landlord coming that he would throw his bonnet into the ditch and, bowing low, run eagerly to meet him.

‘What ye’d call a serf?’ he questioned.

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ I suggested. ‘Serfs don’t usually run to meet their masters.’

‘Unless—they think they’re going to get something?’

‘They didn’t get much.’

‘No, but—ach t’hell, anyway.’

‘Quite so.’

And there followed a passage or two of history. The Scots are pretty good at history. Which, perhaps, is why most of them mistrust it. For it is full of facts, most of them ugly.

It is full of other things, too, but they tend to get lost or mislaid. Descendants of the MacVurichs, bards to Clanranald, may still be found in Tobermory, and a very intelligent merchant assured me that there is one who still extemporises poetry and recently produced a broadside of satiric contemporary verse that split his sides. Also one who knows all the history not only of this part of the world, with its clans and chiefs and battles long ago, but also of Ireland, thus uniting in himself the old seanachaidh, the complete Gael. But the true inwardness here is difficult to penetrate, without time and some knowledge, particularly of Gaelic. For the normal tourist, it is impossible to penetrate, being beyond picturesqueness or the presence of unusual personal attributes, good or bad. For here, I suppose, nothing less than a whole way of civilisation got lost or mislaid.