“I said to him,” Ansel wrote in his diary, “that’s the worst rock pile I ever saw and there’s no landing place within forty rows of apple trees. By landing place I meant a harbor where we could load stone aboard of a vessel. But Robert kept on looking at it. I will say it was a sightly island, but I did not like the look of it from the beginning.”

He also wrote, “It is a waste of time to argue with Robert, I have found out that. Because when you have got done, you find you have not changed his mind, so your time is wasted anyway.”

This was the journal which did not come to light until years after Ansel’s death, and then was rummaged out of a trunk in the attic of his empty house by his young grandson, Elbridge Gilman. There was little enough in it about the actual happenings of that day. Most of what took place, Elbridge got from his other grandfather, who was MacKechnie.

“Nevertheless I said to him,” MacKechnie said, “that I would like to land and look it over.”

They landed on Chin Island, on the beach by the stone marked “A,” and hauled up their punt; and MacKechnie went as straight as a hunting dog through the tangled thickets and the swamp to what he was looking for—the high-nosed hill, rounded, polished by weather—clean outcrop, straight-grained red granite.

“He kept up with me until we came to the swamp,” MacKechnie said, “and then he fell behind and didna catch up until I had been for some time on top of the hill. I thought it was the swamp that was bothering him—a stone man hates a swamp like a cup of cold poison, you have to have hard ground to move granite over; but it seems it was not that, or not that entirely.”

Before they left the island that day, Ansel and Robert had a fight. They stood toe to toe on the level bank near the stone marked “A” and decided whether or not to put their money into a granite quarry on the island. Robert wanted to; Ansel didn’t; and Robert won.

It was a long time afterwards and Ansel had been dead for years, before MacKechnie told his grandson, Elbridge Gilman, the grandson of them both, how the settlement on the island had begun with a fight.

“And a bloody one,” MacKechnie said. “My nose bled for a week. We told the girls we’d fallen down yon mountain.”