We came on the priest mending the road before his gate and he welcomed us with the courtesy that is native to the Islesman; and the overbrimming hospitality. It is pleasant to come from a long journey on foot into a living land. To be treated in the midst thereof to wine, and in the fullness of time to cakes and honey, does help to entrench the precariously held belief in human goodness!

Though when the talk got round to the past history of the Small Isles and I learned something of their vital statistics, the belief had all it could do to hold its own.

The clearances again. They dogged us everywhere we went, and at times the tale sickened us, so that we could have wished for something new, were it only some new variety of economic atrocity.

Rum, as has been said, provides perhaps the most readily intelligible example of what landlordism succeeded in doing to the Highlands and Islands. But it is doubtful now if it could ever be repopulated successfully under any scheme. It is often easier to break in the virgin wild than clean the waste land that was once cultivated. It was a point that had never been put to me so clearly before.

Eigg and Canna are kindlier islands and certainly could carry many more good crofts. We heard rumours that Canna might be ‘raided’, for there is land there as fertile as may be found in the Lothians.

But these stories of the Small Isles being raided by men from overcrowded islands farther west wanting new crofts are now getting fairly hoary. I could have more readily believed in them if I could have seen in this crofting settlement of Cleadale a desire by the young and eager for more crofts on their own island. But this I did not see. What I discovered instead was something very different, that looked rather like the disintegration of Cleadale itself, so that if I were tempted to prophesy I should say that in two or three generations there will be no crofters around Laig Bay and all Eigg island will be one sporting estate. Not, here, by any particular compulsion of the present landlord, but from general social causes that have been active for a century, that have not generally been arrested, and, as things are, that are not likely to be.

Sad to think of this fertile spot without waving fields and human voices, without cakes and honey, a wilderness of rank growths and dead memories. Not a pleasant picture to contemplate in the company of one who loved the people so well and was in himself so hospitable.

We were guided down to the beach, that smooth wide sickle of brown sand, and along to its north corner, where, in the soft sandstone, hard polished boulders are stuck like plums in a face of cake. This is the place to study structural geology. One boulder that the sea had picked out was in every detail like a huge skull and it was exhibited to us like a family heirloom. We would have gone along to the Singing Sands, but Father Campbell told us they were too wet to perform to-day. Though what I should really have liked to have done was to have followed the coastline north-about and hunted for one of Hugh Miller’s plesiosaruri by Ru-Stoir. And that I might have found—though not the shieling where he was so hospitably entertained by the girls who lived there all alone making butter and cheese in this same month of July. ‘An island girl of eighteen, more than good-looking, though much embrowned by the sun, had come to the door to see who the unwanted visitors might be. . . . I have not yet seen the true Celtic interjection of welcome—the kindly “Ooo”—attempted on paper; but I had a very agreeable specimen of it on this occasion, viva voce.’