Altogether this had been a very neat manoeuvre and the lead showed us to be in a comfortable five fathoms. That evening the wind took off, and I fastened the big clasp knife securely to the short stern flagpole, got arms and shoulders bare, and though the dinghy was still heaving away, I could now and then get a glimpse of the rope on the shaft. I had put a fine edge on the blade and started in to cut, guided by the soft feel of the rope. In twenty minutes I had the propeller clear.

Lying in our comfortable bunks that evening, peace descended on us. The boat swung slowly round and back through a wide arc while the water lapped audibly the clinker sides of the dinghy. The skies were grey. There was no one on the pier; no human being visible anywhere. Through the open cabin doors we could see the shore, and it passed before us like a slow-motion picture, in which all the small things seen took on a reality of their own and even composed themselves into a pattern, like a story.

First the pier with its grey massive wooden piles and dark shed. Then the shore and the seaweed, with two boats hauled clear, one freshly painted black and white with an orange bead and the other black and white with a white bead and blue gunwales. Beyond them, a crofter’s cottage, white in the evening light, and two dark sheds. A small stream coming down from the crofting lands and spanned near the sea by a little square stone bridge. Dark stones along the shore and wet brown weed. A low black skerry whitened with barnacles—a dangerous place to drag against—and a greyish-blue cow eating on the gentle slope beyond it. All the land rose and dipped in flowing lines of easy beauty to a ridge against the sky that could not be more than a mile away. The grass was browned with ling so that the patches of bracken were greener than it. The undersides of the bracken, turning over, let you see the wind running on pale green feet. There were no trees except two small birches overhanging a near bank with a ghost-white rock beneath it. Grey fence stobs against the sky, and then slowly coming into view a ruinous thatched cottage, a green boat beside it, and a tarred one showing its stem round a gable-end, sheltering there, too old to go to sea. But the old red cow was still eating, with the industry of all the working mothers in the world. Through the lapping of the water against the dinghy came the song of a lark. It was exactly ten o’clock (summer time), but we had heard a cuckoo at Duntulm after eleven. The lark’s song was piercingly sweet and earth and sea were suspended from it; until suddenly a sea-bird’s cry ran along the shore, and in the sound of it were the swift feet and the dipping tail.