I ran into the skipper of the schooner the following morning. He was a disappointed man, though with the undemonstrative toughness or endurance that goes with the Glasgow accent. In such an encounter, you can read the whole history of the Clyde. The accent may not have what is deemed polish or suavity, but it has pith and nearly always a natural gaiety or optimism. It is the speech of men of brains who make things with their hands. Fine obliging men to meet, too, prepared to be friendly, and at their best doing you a good turn. There is a similar sort of gaiety or optimism in the Cockney, perhaps; though he may have lost that toughness of fibre that naturally enough characterises the engineer, for metropolitan shopkeeping has other needs. The schooner carried a hundred tons of coal and supplied lighthouses and odd merchants in outlying places. The previous Saturday, when I knew there had been a good swell running, she had actually gone into the narrow rocky fissure that is the harbour for Ardnamurchan lighthouse.

‘Surely you had difficulty in getting in?’

‘No. There’s a foot or two to spare on each hand.’

‘But the swell?’

‘Ay. Ye’ve got to watch that.’

That wasn’t his trouble now. At six o‘clock this morning he had set off for Kilhoan with a few tons of coal for a merchant—to find that the puffer had beaten him to it, and as two vessels could not unload at the same time, there had been nothing for him to do but come back and wait. The loss of a whole day! ‘If only I’d guessed, I’d have been off at four,’ he said, a philosophic grudge in his voice. He had a 40 h.p. Kelvin engine, reconditioned four years ago. ‘No; no trouble,’ he assured me, ‘and it has done thousands of miles now.’ He deserved that piece of luck.

Lying at the jetty was an old smack with the lovely name of Anna Bhan (Fair Anna). She was being tarred all over before running forty tons of gravel to Coll.

So Tobermory presented its contrasts.

Altogether it was an island of contrasts. Once Mull carried a population of 8,000, I was told, whereas now it is little over 2,000 (2,388 in 1931), and of that total Tobermory itself accounts for 800. How did the population diminish? I wish I could think of some new answer. And the attitude of the inhabitants themselves? Those of the older generation will tell you that the young will not stay. It is not only now an economic problem, but a defeatist or psychological problem. And that lands us back in history again.

For Mull is indeed a self-contained island garden when compared, say, with the Faroes, a group of a score of islands lying away towards the Arctic Circle some two hundred miles north-west of the Shetlands. But in these treeless isles with their deep fiords and dangerous currents, there is an industrious and thriving population of nearly 26,000. Yet their total area is only 540 square miles against Mull’s 350. In the last ten years the increase in the population of the Faroes is about 50 per cent. greater than the total Mull population. It is the sort of sum in arithmetic that those forever crying for outside aid might ponder before delivering themselves positively of the right answer.