After breakfast we bade goodbye to our charming hostess, and set off for the place of the boat.

I was never much use at bargaining, finding it easier always to say yes or no. Yet true bargaining is a fine art and requires character. To see two Irishmen bargaining over a horse at a Kerry fair is one of the liveliest and most heartening things in life. I can just remember the old hillmarket at home, the scoffing, the sarcastic witticisms, the derisive toss of the head, the walking away, the coming back, up to the spitting on palms and clasping of hands, and the withdrawal to the long white tent where healths were drunk with cordiality and mutual esteem. As boys, the spectacle to us was of the greatest mirth, with a thread of admiration in it for the finer points.

I could not hope to achieve anything like that, yet the owner and I walked away from the others, and after courteous preliminaries I found myself obliged to name my figure.

Absurd! Impossible! No use talking! For that matter he did not want to sell the boat at all! No, no! On my part I explained truthfully how at the same figure I could obtain a bigger and stronger boat in Lewis and offered to provide name and address. However, if he was not selling, of course that ended the matter. We became distant and even more polite. We rejoined the others. We entered his house. The talk went to and fro, detachedly, as if boat-selling were a matter of remote interest. Until at last the two protagonists regarded each other across the table and the owner said, ‘It is the old custom: let us split the difference.’ I gave him my hand.

Down to the sea we all went and inspected the boat. Assurances were given regarding painting inside and out and the fixing up of the engine so that I could take her over in a sea-going condition before the beginning of June. I asked her name, for it was not painted on her, and was told it was Thistle. There was a smile at this for I had been somewhat concerned with Scottish affairs for years, and Eoin thought it a good omen! The owner had only had the boat about a year, and had not got her original particulars, but so far as he knew the engine was not more than twelve to fifteen years old. Old enough in my view, but not hopelessly old for a poppet-valve Kelvin. So the new ownership was toasted, and sometime after midday Eoin and I started back for Inverness.

We stopped at Portree to send off a telegram, advising the purchase of the Thistle and our return about six o’clock, for we were expecting some guests at that hour.

Neither of us is ever likely to forget that run, for lack of sleep and many toasts can induce a state of being in which the flesh grows tenuous and the mind floats like thistledown in a white wind. The fevers and greeds of living are understood and all one’s enemies forgiven; not at all to be confused with the mood of never climbing up the climbing wave; for it is so full of brightness that it sees even optimism as half-blind struggle.