Letters and telegrams—and a couple of weeks later Eoin and I were on the road again, assured the boat would be launched and ready.

May and June are, as a rule, the most perfect weather months in the Western Highlands. Early spells of cold wind, bright sun, and flying cloud, invigorating days, running into weeks sometimes without any rain, are followed by June warmth and the endless June nights.

Of all months, give me June, though it can be fine to go through May to reach it, May of the green leaves. As Eoin and I set off on an evening in mid-May the birches were out, tentative as young love, quiet as thought. For in Glenmoriston the birches in the evenings are cowled a little, like forest acolytes, their shoulders drawn together, their heads slightly bowed. As we returned two mornings later, with the sun turning every tender leaf translucent, they were pure aspiration, living green fires, holding to the earth by some miracle whose harmony took our breath.

It is a great run, by Loch Ness, up Glenmoriston, past Cluanie Inn, and down the long green defile to the Seven Sisters of Kintail and the shores of Loch Duich. If we travelled at as high a speed as the narrow twisting road would permit, it was because we had to. Besides, there is the positive exhilaration the diver gets between a high rock and the deep water, or a salmon between the deep water and the sky. And then the West again. In the evening light its grey timeless spirit came towards us and flowed in behind.

But we knew about that timelessness all right! We were not deceived any more than by the treacherous turns up Mam Ratagan, though our attention was claimed by the young forest already clothing in green that noble hillside. How magnificent the Western Highlands will yet be when afforestation has come into its own! These young trees had all the hope and sap of invincible youth.

There was a brave new ferry-boat, too, at Kylerhea, with a 30 h.p. Kelvin engine, which defeated the swift tidal current with such ease, that we tried to amuse ourselves by wondering what Boswell would have struck out of Johnson had they been here now.

As a lad I had many a time pulled my row-boat smartly into the current and then lain back to be floated away towards Glenelg. There was a Christmas memory, too, of carrying a pushbike on my back up the hillside through the snow and down the steep slopes to the shores of Loch Duich. But what sticks in the mind most persistently is a boyhood day spent on the moor beyond the stiff climb from Kylerhea.

To Eoin, this climb presented no difficulty, for he had learned the wisdom of changing down to bottom gear before tackling the two short steep slopes near the top. Not to do this is to invite stalling and temporary difficulties.

It was deep gloaming when we emerged on the moor and followed the road that winds by the little stream towards Broadford. A whole summer day the boy had spent there, guddling yellow trout, looking over the silent moors, seeing no living soul. It had been a day of such curious and intimate loneliness, so withdrawn from all practical ways of being and thought, that I can afford to wonder if it happened to me in this life, or indeed if it happened at all.