The esplanade that evening was thronged, and we sauntered along like strangers returned to a life which is not quite real, its preoccupations and tricks of conduct and speech having a curious echo quality. That contact with nature (even if in her wilder moods, when emotions and capacity for action had been unusually quickened) for a mere handful of days should produce this effect is, I think, remarkable. We experienced it pointedly more than once. In fact we never lost it during the whole trip, and after two days in Oban we felt we had to move on again to things we could get a solid grip of. Even the food in the hotel seemed desperately reminiscent. We had been looking forward to a magnificent feed of quite a few courses; really doing ourselves well; and had joked about it in happy anticipation. And now out of the corner of my eye I saw the Crew, with an odd sort of dismay on her face, unable to finish her meat. She explained that she had been given too much, that it was a bit tough, with too many vegetables; too much on her plate. She was almost hurt, as if her toy had got broken. When the Mate, having finished all that went before, took a plateful of apple tart, with cream, she revolted. The coffee was quite good, but somehow still and oily, not with the steaming fragrant top we had got used to. Possibly we were too physically tired after our strenuous day (with the Crew unknowingly exhausted from over-excitement) to enjoy much eating. Whatever the reason, the feast was voted dull and stodgy.

‘I never realised before’, said the Crew, ‘that man is just a cannibal.’

Though I had eaten pretty well myself, I admitted handsomely that I would have swopped the whole lot for one of her salads.

For what she does not know about internal combustion engines, she makes up on her salads. Like these weather effects over wide areas, they are pretty marvellous affairs, with a universal reach across the vegetable kingdom and a skill in selection and blending that would make any critic, pure and undefiled or gorged by cannibalism, offer up a soft sigh.

Basic ingredients may consist of lettuce, tomato, beetroot, bits of sliced date, banana and orange, with nuts, peas and other evasive pellets, until complications are introduced from grated turnip and carrot to parsley and mint, and whatever luck there may be with the more usual elements from onions to cucumber, not forgetting stoned raisins.

A revolting conglomerate, in turn? All I can honestly say is that it has its perfect moment, and not least when it is sweetened by the fruit to that point—and that point only—when the juices of the mouth naturally flow. And when anything is just so sweetened one is inclined to eat of it on and on. Just as certain unfortunate persons, finding a drink palatable, may drink on and on. And even on.