the local people, and to give
them something to talk of, and they old men," or to match his coursing
greyhound against any dog in the world for a ten-pound note, or to
deluther some red-cheeked likely woman....

And Uncle Robin might hear of it, and he'd sit down and write a book,
saying where it probably was, and how you might get there, and what the
people were like, and whom they were probably descended from.... And
the book would be in all the libraries of the world, and people would be
writing him telling him what a great head was on him, and he'd mutter:
"Nonsense! Nonsense! All nonsense!" and stroke his great red beard....

But wouldn't it be the funny thing, the queer and funny thing, if he
himself, wee Shane Campbell, were to go out and discover that island,
and to own it, and to have it marked in the maps and charts, "Wee Shane
Campbell's Island," for all to read and see?...

"Decent wee fellow, is it about here somewhere the house of the McFees?"

Shane had turned into the main road that ran along the sea-shore on the
way homeward when the voice hailed him. It was a great black-bearded
man, sitting on the ditch, holding his shoes in his hand. His face was
tanned to mahogany, and in his ears were little gold rings. He wore
clothes that were obviously new, obviously uncomfortable.

"If you keep on the road about a half a mile and then turn to the left,
and keep on there until you come to a loaning near a well with a
hawthorn-bush couching over it, and turn to the left down that loaning,
you'll come to it. It's a wee thatched house, needing a coat of
whitewash. It's got a byre with a slate roof, and a rowan-tree near it.
You canna' miss it."

"Now isn't that the queer thing," the big man said, "me that thought I
knew every art and part of this country, and that could find my way in
the dark from Java Head to Poplar Parish, can't remember the place where
I was born and reared? Forty years of traveling on the main ocean and
thinking long for this place, and now when I come back I know no more
about it than a fish does of dry land." He stood up painfully. "And me
that thought I would come back leaping like a hare am now killed
entirely with the soreness of my feet."

"You're not accustomed to walking, then, honest man?"

"'Deed, and you may say I'm not, decent wee fellow. I'm a sailorman, and
aboard ship there's very little use for the feet. You've got to be quick
as a fish with the hands, and have great s