‘Do you mean that shed—’

‘I should not advise you to call it a shed—not over there,’ he suggested with a glimmer of humour. ‘It is a house erected by——’ and he named a city firm of builders.

We apologised for the deficiencies in our sight, due to the very considerable distance, and parted still smiling.

We got a lift in a car which was hastening to Salen on Mull Sound to pick up a load of tourists from the steamer. I kept looking around the countryside because if I looked ahead at the turns on the narrow road I might sprain a tendon putting on imaginary brakes. ‘This is all over the clegs,’ said the Mate nonchalantly.

But, for our courage, the woman in the farmhouse just beyond the road on the south side of Loch Caol introduced me to her garden. The farm may not have had a notably prosperous look, but the garden was a marvel in that land. Lettuces were growing in abundance, and cabbages, carrots, leeks and similar green things, all young and of a ravishing tenderness. I got whatever I wanted, including milk and eggs, and smiled at my astonishing luck and was ashamed of the small cost.

In our absence the Crew had dressed ship with a washing and a gay sight it was, flapping in the breeze. So we ahoyed jocundly. Our gifts were received with proper avidity and in a very short time we were deep in a salad that was crisp and succulent and full of the pleasantest surprises. It was enough for a whole meal in its tempting variety quite apart from the more solid fare, and the cream cheese and biscuits and fresh butter that the Mate proceeded finally to toy with merely kept him, he explained, from drinking his coffee while yet it was too hot. As for fruit or fruit in jelly—later, perhaps. After walking in a hot sun, one should, above all things, be abstemious.

‘I have a hard time of it with you both,’ said the Crew.

By Sunday morning we were really anxious to be off, but the weather was not too good and the glass depressing. We might just as well lie here as in the Bull Hole. It began to spit rain.

We decided to climb a hill-top to get a better view of the weather. As we ascended, curlews and terns kept calling out over the water beneath the overhanging gloom. We crossed a wide marsh of bog asphodel in flower and another of bog myrtle that scented all the air. Behind Bunessan a loch lay in the hills. A livid light shone down on the inner waters of Loch Scridain, and low headlands went out into it and created a phantasmagoria of the nether world. The green terraces—I think we counted over twenty of them once—were shrouded in mists, while Ben Mor and all peaks beneath it were lost in dark cloud. But to the north of the promontory a headland was caught in a diffused light that the gloom turned to a strangely ominous pink. This sabbatical light touched an end of Inch Kenneth, but, beyond, Ulva could be no more than vaguely discerned. Staffa we had come to call the ship, for from Loch Lathaich it looked very like a battleship raked clean. It was still menacingly at anchor, bearing on the Dutchman’s Cap, which, in the thick weather, came and went like the Flying Dutchman of legend.