There was no respite that evening. Every voice was ready and, in merriment, a trifle beyond itself. The day’s worries and troubles were now rich with fun. Eoin knew his people, and a hundred others they all knew. Yes, he had met Tom Macleod. And did they hear about his boat? What! they hadn’t heard how the poor fellow had lost his boat. ‘Go on with you!’ said Eoin; ‘you needn’t tell me you haven’t heard!’

When he had them rocking with expectation, he told them the story, with a mimicry and stuttering that made it thick with life. But first he turned to me, the stranger, and said politely: ‘In Skye and the Islands you will understand that the boat is one of the family. It is like a son. Should it chance to get wrecked it is mourned as a breadwinner. For it is nothing less. Indeed perhaps there is many a member of a family of far less use to the home than the boat.’ He made this so clear that through restrained laughter the sea came to our feet; a truth so close that its intimacy might have embarrassed us had Eoin himself not been so simple and direct. Well, it appeared that Tom Macleod’s boat had got a plank staved in on the rocks, just off the pier. A gust of wind had swept her into the swing of the tide and before his half-brother could get her nose to it, ‘she was round on him—a thing that could happen easily enough to anyone’. But Tom and his half-brother were pretty quiet about it, for their next-door neighbour in the clachan, Mrs. Grant, had just died. A decent old woman. Now the minister, who was new enough to the place, didn’t he in the first of the darkening come to Tom Macleod’s door, thinking it the house where the corpse was. And knocked. (Three knocks gave Eoin.) The door opened and there was Tom.

‘I am very grieved’, said the minister, ‘very grieved indeed to hear the sad news.’

‘Och yes,’ said Tom, ‘it’s s-sad enough.’

‘Very hard on you, very hard truly.’

The deep ministerial sympathy moved Tom to make the best of things. ‘Ah well,’ he answered, ‘it’s maybe not so h-hard as all that. It’s my b-brother that was mostly going about with her. And we have been th-thinking that with a good strong patch on her b-b-bottom she should be all right.’

Sometime before midnight Eoin suddenly decided that I must meet a special friend of his. (Wherever he goes he has special friends that you must meet.) So three of us set off, the slight bulge of a pocket denoting a friendly gift in tissue-paper. We felt sure the family would be in bed. But the light was in the window and Eoin followed his knock and greeting and we were welcomed with exclamations of delighted astonishment as if we were accompanying Mary of the Songs herself.

When toasts were drunk—the woman of the house touching the glass with her lips as I had seen many a time done in the northland—Eoin demanded a song. This was far too quick a demand, for song follows a natural mellowing of the mood. But Eoin, on the crest of himself, was well beyond the niceties of social usage. So being pressed in the argument to sing himself, he sang an old Skye Gaelic song. And he sang it well, with the young lads of the household unable to take their shining shy eyes off him. In which mellowing of the atmosphere, Eoin was toasted.