hipelago
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 islet owes its holy and beautiful name, the House
of God.

Among these old wives' stories there was one which I was inclined to hear
with more credulity. As I was told, in that tempest which scattered the
ships of the Invincible Armada over all the north and west of Scotland,
one great vessel came ashore on Aros, and before the eyes of some
solitary people on a hill-top, went down in a moment with all hands, her
colours flying even as she sank. There was some likelihood in this tale;
for another of that fleet lay sunk on the north side, twenty miles from
Grisapol. It was told, I thought, with more detail and gravity than its
companion stories, and there was one particularity which went far to
convince me of its truth: the name, that is, of the ship wa