y House.

THE MERRY MEN

_My dear Lady Taylor_,

_To your name, if I wrote on brass, I could add nothing; it has been
already written higher than I could dream to reach, by a strong and a
dear hand; and if I now dedicate to you these tales,[1] it is not as
the writer who brings you his work, but as the friend who would
remind you of his affection._

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

_Skerryvore, Bournemouth._

THE MERRY MEN

CHAPTER I

EILEAN AROS

It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot for
the last time for Aros. A boat had put me ashore the night before at
Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving
all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by sea,
struck right across the promontory with a cheerful heart.

I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from
an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a
poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in
the islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and
when she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm,
had remained in his possession. It brought him in nothing but the means
of life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had
pursued; he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a
fresh adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at
destiny. Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought
neither help nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the
lowlands; there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my
father was the luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to
die, but he left a son to his name and a little money to support it. I
was a student of Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own
charges, but without kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to
Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held
blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence,
and taught me to count Aros as my home. Thus it was that I came to spend
my vacations in that part of the country, so far from all society and
comfort, between the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that
now, when I had done with my classes, I was returning thither with so
light a heart that July day.

The Ross, as we call it, is a promonto