ere is no man could take a boat within half a
mile of it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer or live in such a
place. You can hear the roaring of it six miles away. At the seaward end
there comes the strongest of the bubble; and it's here that these big
breakers dance together--the dance of death, it may be called--that have
got the name, in these parts, of the Merry Men. I have heard it said
that they run fifty feet high; but that must be the green water only,
for the spray runs twice as high as that. Whether they got the name
from their movements, which are swift and antic, or from the shouting
they make about the turn of the tide, so that all Aros shakes with it,
is more than I can tell.

The truth is, that in a south-westerly wind, that part of our
archipelago is no better than a trap. If a ship got through the reefs,
and weathered the Merry Men, it would be to come ashore on the south
coast of Aros, in Sandag Bay, where so many dismal things befell our
family, as I propose to tell. The thought of all these dangers, in the
place I knew so long, makes me particularly welcome the works now going
forward to set lights upon the headlands and buoys along the channels of
our iron-bound, inhospitable islands.

The country people had many a story about Aros, as I used to hear from
my uncle's man, Rorie, an old servant of the Macleans, who had
transferred his services without afterthought on the occasion of the
marriage. There was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie, that
dwelt and did business in some fearful manner of his own among the
boiling breakers of the Roost. A mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag
beach, and there sang to him a long, bright midsummer's night, so that
in the morning he was found stricken crazy, and from thenceforward, till
the day he died, said only one form of words; what they were in the
original Gaelic I cannot tell, but they were thus translated: "Ah, the
sweet singing out of the sea." Seals that haunted on that coast have
been known to speak to man in his own tongue, presaging great disasters.
It was here that a certain saint first landed on his voyage out of
Ireland to convert the Hebrideans. And, indeed, I think he had some
claim to be called saint; for, with the boats of that past age, to make
so rough a passage, and land on such a ticklish coast, was surely not
far short of the miraculous. It was to him, or to some of his monkish
underlings who had a cell there, that the