“If you could have seen yon hill that morning the way I saw it—the clean granite, none finer in Scotland or in any place in the world I ever saw, the hill itself, and the island lying there as if untouched since the start of time—I remember there away east and south was a mess of rocks and timber—plenty of poles stout enough for derricks, I noticed at once—then a black headland and a wrack of ledges breaking white, and all the sea and sky in the world. And I said, ‘What a place, Ansel! Look at yon stone!’ And he said, ‘Considerable surf, ain’t there?’ and went stomping back down the hill.

“I did not go back to the boat for three hours, but spent time going over the island to see what might be done. I found it would be a terrific job of work but could be done,” said MacKechnie.

His Scottish burr was a memory, overlaid now with a Yankee twang through years of association, and his voice had always been curiously gentle for so tempestuous, though so small sized, a man. “So I went back to the shore and there was Ansel with a face like a meat ax, because he guessed when I didna come that I was up on the hill, looking, with serious purpose in my mind. Besides, I looked as if I had swum the frog pond. My clothes were ripped from the blackberry bushes, and I had a great splat of mud across my face.

“ ‘If a hundred-and-thirty-pound man has that much trouble clawing himself down from that hill,’ he says to me, ‘what about loads of granite blocks weighing upwards of five tons?’

“If I hadna been already put out with him, I would have been then, as he well knew. I have never wished to be twitted about my size. So I went to the spring and washed my face without making him an answer.

“ ‘Do you expect to drop and bounce them, maybe?’ he says. ‘Or dig a canal in across that swamp and sail your vessels up to the foot of the hill?’

“I said, ‘We can throw a causeway across the swamp, there’s a place where ’tis no a hundred feet wide, and then all downhill and hard ground to the shore,’ and he snorted like a bull.