Portree is finely situated overlooking a noble anchorage. The town itself is not very interesting architecturally, and the new bungalows on the heights behind could hardly be said to have improved the scene. But perhaps it is all too easy to vision what might have been, for here surely is the very situation for the queen of the whole north-west. Certainly nature did her best. And man with his limited resources, harried by barbarians out of the south, doubtless did his best too—just as he did with the lifeboat conversion in the harbour, though that was a neat job.

But what I was looking for was the black reef—and when I saw it, out beyond the harbour to the left, I got a touch of the old thrill. I had gone across to Raasay with a girl in a row-boat, leaving another couple on shore, and on the way back a growing wind very nearly beat us. Feeling gone from wrists and arms and pulling with the dead weight of the body, I was lucky at last to beach on Skye, where all four of us managed to heave the small boat beyond high-water mark near An Tom Point.

Presently we saw a fishing boat leave Portree. It was now blowing half a gale and getting dark, so she could never be going to sea. At last, three of us got on board her in the shelter of a headland, and I went back along shore to launch our boat to be taken in tow. In the midst of this manoeuvre, the fishing boat’s engine broke down. Mast had to be stepped and canvas rigged. And then right in the teeth of it, we tacked back into Portree harbour.

The exhilaration of a sea-storm turns dull men vivid, dumb men into a shout, and slow men into the leap of a sword. There is no intoxicant to be compared with it.

As the skipper went for the black spit of rock, his two sons stood ready. At his quiet word, they leapt. She came up towards the eye of the wind, hesitated for one long desperate moment, then fell away again, defeated. The yawing swing of her head was a strange living gesture, like the movement of the head and neck of a horse I once saw drowning. Quietly, without word or movement, the skipper gave her defeated head its way, the canvas all the wind it could carry, and made straight for the root of the reef. When the last moment seemed long past, he spoke again. Bravely she came up from her steering way, strained through the desperate moment, then fell away on the new tack and passed the reef’s point with a plunging forefoot.

So naturally I should like to praise Portree, its people, and their kindness.

But the country folk feel that the inhabitants of their capital look down upon them as provincials and barbarians, and in heated argument they will damn the town as ‘a drunken hole’. But then Portree basks in the sun of the licensing authorities and city men do have their superior ways.