It was great fun after that, picking up pole after pole—for they are widely spaced—on the three-mile channel winding its narrow way amid innumerable rocks.

When at last we emerged, the rain gone, and saw the houses and trees of lovely Arisaig, we felt masters of the situation. The sheltered waters were little more than darkened by the wind and we began looking for some sort of harbour. The chart showed ‘Arisaig Harbour’ right in on the starboard hand, but we could not even see a jetty. However, when we picked up a red buoy lying well inshore, I put her at it, and in due time I resigned the helm to the Crew, reduced the throttle speed nonchalantly, pulled the lever without any difficulty into neutral, ran her on the last of her seaway up into the wind at a reasonable distance from the buoy, while the Crew took a sounding of nearly two fathoms, dropped the anchor carefully, paid out chain at my leisure, then stopped the engine, as if we had been doing this sort of thing perfectly all the days of our lives! It was worth some laughter and, in truth, we were as delighted with ourselves as children.

There is, by the way, no pier or jetty. You go ashore in your dinghy and scramble up over the weed. But there is an excellent shop where you get everything, except perhaps two of the most indispensable of all things—fresh vegetables and eggs. In any case there were none for sale when we were there, but this was a lack that dogged us all over the West, even in busy tourist places. No wonder the Crew had exclaimed, like a traveller in a desert, at sight of the oasis of cabbage lettuces in Eigg! And such lettuces, with such hearts! Is there any place in the British Isles—excepting certain areas of Ireland—where more succulent vegetables or sweeter flavoured berries can be grown than in the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland? And is there any place where they are grown less? But one would at least expect in a normal tourist centre, such as Arisaig, that some local gardener or crofter would try to meet a seasonal demand, even if he was not partial to such cow fodder (as I thereabouts heard it called) himself. Apparently not, for when we accidentally encountered some Glasgow friends, they said they had hunted green food in vain. We never did manage to buy West Coast fresh fish on the West Coast—but then there may be no fresh fish there (apart from those that deliver themselves up to trawlers). But of that again, for meantime I had got in touch with the hotel keeper, a true host, who made no more difficulty over cashing a cheque than over providing a large tankard of true and frothful draught. He had lettuces for table, too—and grown, I should say, in his own garden. May it increase. Then I wired an old friend, Maurice Walsh, news of our landfall, as we had had a few adventures in our day together, and he and his wife were anxious to see what ploy we were up to now. I had no sooner done that than we ran into a poet and his wife, who entertained us right splendidly. Had we met Mr. L. A. G. Strong? He had a house thereabouts. Oh, a real writer’s haunt. And artists, too. . . .