We left that kindly house, after breaking bread, and entered a circle where the fun was more natural than ever. Songs came at intervals, but what sticks in the mind most is the subject-matter of some of the stories. Humour and vivacity and richness of texture. My sparse Gaelic was hopelessly insufficient to follow Eoin at his best, and he would turn and translate, saying, ‘It doesn’t sound nearly so bad in the Gaelic.’ And I believed him, though it occasionally required some effort of the sympathetic imagination! The English translation was, by the normal social standards of mixed company, so shocking that one wonders whether Urquhart, in his great masterpiece, did yet achieve the translation of the social spirit that encompassed Rabelais. Clearly Eoin could talk of things in Gaelic to his compeers that were untranslatable into English without a complete loss of original innocence. Of this I have no doubt, because certain nouns were known to me in both tongues. In Gaelic, the old woman in his story could use a word by way of exclamatory objurgation that, if I were to translate it into the only English equivalent we have, would certainly worry the censor.

At that hour it was clear to me as a vision that such original innocence could come only out of a long tradition. It went back beyond original sin, perhaps all the way to that ‘golden age’ when the humours and practices of the flesh could illustrate a life story, as bubbles, rising and plopping, indicate a healthy ferment—with the assurance, when all is distilled, of a pure spirit.

But then I admit the hour was getting pretty early. At half-past five I thought I had better get to bed, for I had had only three hours sleep the night before, and the boat was still sailing her dark sea. So I left them to their songs of innocence and fell asleep, trying to bring her to a mooring.

The effort must still have been in my head when I heard the door open and saw Eoin enter carefully with a glass of whisky. ‘Are you feeling dry?’ he whispered. He sat on my bed. ‘Take that, it’ll do you good. I’ve been thinking about the boat.’

Solemnly there, and with the voices of conspirators, we talked about the boat and what she was worth and what should be offered for her. It was a long earnest talk. The hour was six-thirty, there was frost on the grass, and the sunlight, bright in its morning innocence, was watching us through the window. We came to extremely intricate yet perfectly clear decisions regarding methods of procedure, and as there was nowhere to set down the glass (there may be a greater abomination than whisky at such an hour, but I do not know of it) I drank it, and it did me good. In fact I got up and dressed.

Skye was a poem that the poets have forgotten how to make. It held me to the window, startled more than a little, as if I had just missed the passing of silver wings. The brightness they had left behind held the magic that, in after thought, one believes to be no more than the deceptive by-product of a mood, but that at the moment provided the strange and almost terrible certainty that one should never recapture it.