In Carbost I saw the first newspaper for about a week and was relieved to know that the European war had not started. Indeed the trouble in Spain seemed to have taken second place to sport, and our hostess described with what thrilling excitement she had been listening in to an endless bout between Austin and Von Kramm.

I had the distinct feeling of coming from another planet and of being told of things that happened in some previous incarnation, distinguished by a queer hectic sort of futility. At such a moment one becomes obsessed by a curious awkwardness, until the old trick of quick converse is simulated again. And to complete this provincial attitude, let me confess that when I did finally, in the quiet of the little bay, get down to the newspaper, I turned it over, page after page, and then back again to the beginning, but could not find whatever it was I had hoped to find. It wasn’t there, and though I was vaguely disappointed, yet again I didn’t mind. It didn’t matter. The only news I really wanted was of Spain. It alone seemed immensely important; and still at the back of my mind was the battleship we had seen steaming slowly north, the day before we had left Duntulm.

My favourite of all single whiskies is Glen Mhor of Inverness. When you get it good it is clean and very palatable indeed. But if you get Talisker good, and get it in Skye, it is really surprisingly fine. Whisky, like all the other good things in life, must be taken with moderation and at the right time. There is, of course, the case of long abstinence and a burst; but that is very difficult.

As I walked the four miles home by the western shore of Loch Harport, I read some of my letters. They, too, were a little distant, though now and then one of them came near the heart. I could see that this absence or escape could make one very sensitive to real values, with a quickened capacity to distinguish between the warmest expressions of social usage and the direct true feeling from an individual mind. It threw into a momentary but clear light what was real in the old argument of the individual versus the mass.

When I got back to Portnalong my old friend was ‘barking’, or soaking with pitch, his best net in the big iron pot which Mrs. Morrison used for her vegetable dyes. The operation over, he turned the pot upside down ‘lest the little one should fall in’. The little one, two years old, was trying in Gaelic to get the black cat to wait for her, but a’ phiseag dhubh was wise.

The Crew had been greatly interested in this business of collecting wild flowers and roots and lichens for making cloth dyes, and had taken a pencil with her, determined to jot down the Gaelic names of the various plants. But she was disappointed. They did not seem to know the names of the flowers and in fact used very few of them, because most of the dyes in synthetic form could be bought at the shop. But one could see that a generation or two ago all the dyes were got from plants and the crotal-brown is still got from lichen gathered off rocks. A layer of wool, a layer of crotal, a layer of wool, a layer of crotal, and so on till the pot is full. But in the case of pink, the woman said that she first boils all the pink clover flowers, including leaves and roots rolled into a ball, in the pot and then dyes the wool in the juice. To deepen the pink add more clover. Ragwort and one or two other plants are still used, but the convenience of the ready-made article at the shop is naturally, and rightly, very attractive. The Crew was amused by the belief that the little tormentil grew up into a buttercup. Here was the disintegration, the gradual dying, of an old art based on an exact knowledge, and the Crew, though seeing the inevitability, regretted it, too.