Lengthening his stride a little, he observes, ‘I wonder why the fellow who compiled the Clyde Cruising Club Sailing Directions thought of inserting “Inn at Bunessan”? Why Inn? What, strictly speaking, has that got to do with navigation? I have been trying to think it out, but can make little of it.’

‘Look!’ says the Crew, and dives to the ditchside where some curious weed is growing.

‘Marvellous!’ agrees the Mate, absent-mindedly getting between her and the ditch.

‘I hope’, she says, ‘we’ll be able to get some milk.’ And then she spies a croft house well off the road.

‘But why get milk there now—then carry it into Bunessan —and then carry it back?’ he asks with helpful logic.

But Bunessan is farther away than we thought, and by the time we reach the roadside public hall, we find that it is nine o‘clock and that the district is en fête with a cake and candy sale. As we enter the village, the Crew asks a woman where she can get milk and is directed to the inn—‘round the back’.

The Mate, shaking his head sadly at this conjunction, leads us round the back and we find ourselves in a crush of men in a dark passage. After he has had a few confidential words with a black-haired maid, we are led into the dining room in front, and there the Crew at last arranges for a bucket of milk.

After we had wished one another a continuance of good health, there was no great hurry, and in the shop that is also the post office, we got fresh stores, including tomatoes that were quite firm. And somewhere or other the Crew got new-laid eggs.

There was a great press of life in Bunessan that night, for the cake and candy carnival was to be followed by a dance, and quite a bit of tartan was swinging around visitors’ legs, while young women flitted from point to point in that sort of aimless excitement that is very catching.

Bunessan itself does not look a flourishing place. Decay seems to have touched a past busy-ness and left its mark on the untidy foreshore. It is finely situated, as indeed are all the villages and towns round the inner crescents of the bays of the West.

But to-night Bunessan is alive. The old native life has natural colour in its cheeks. After much anticipation, the excitement of an opening reel to the ancient music sets a healthy body clean daft. Hooch! and swing and set and hooch! again. ‘That’s the stuff, Davy!’

You can tell the visitors by the civilised way in which they mix between dances. They have not the old native manners that set the men and the women apart, like two opposing electrodes. The current of music, the flash: they miss that intensity of the flash. This easy familiarity is very civilised and pleasant; but its potential seems low. In a country dance, anyway. For there is something strangely attractive about a country dance. It may be the wide world outside that is strange, the stars, the mid-summer glimmer on the horizon, a greyer glimmer of sea with dark islands, and secret dark hollows everywhere. The meeting of the creative forces of the earth in a lighted room, like the manifestation of the earth’s electrical energy in a dynamo. And there is something dynamic in a country dance.