f Spanish mahogany,
with wide and searching eyes and long curled hair of the deepest black.
His dress was singularly perjink, cut trim and tight from a blue cloth,
the collar of a red shirt rolled over on the bosom, a pair of simple
gold rings pierced the ears. As he looked at the boy, he was humming
very softly to himself a Skye song, and he stopped in the midst of it
with "So '_iile_, have you lost your ship?" A playful scamp was revealed
in his smile.

Gilian turned round with a start of alarm, for he had been on some
coracle of fancy, sailing upon magic seas, and thus to break upon his
reverie with the high Gaelic of Skye was to plunge him in chilling
waters.

"_Thig an so_--come here," said the seaman, beckoning, setting an easy
foot upon the deck.

Gilian went slowly forward, he was amazed and fascinated by this
wondrous seaman come upon the stillness of the harbour without warning,
a traveller so important yet so affable in his invitation. Black Duncan
that day was in a good humour, for his owners had released him at last
from his weeks of tethering to the quay and this dull town and he was to
depart to-morrow with his cargo of timber. In a little he had Gilian's
history, and they were comrades. He took him round the deck and showed
its simple furniture, then in the den he told him mariners' tales of the
sea.

A Carron stove burned in the cabin, dimly, yet enough to throw at times
a flicker of light upon the black beams overhead, the vessel's ribs, the
bunks that hung upon them. Sitting on a sea-chest, Gilian felt the floor
lift and fall below him, a steady motion wholly new, yet confirming
every guess he had made in dreams of life upon the wave. A ceaseless
sound of water came through the wood, of the tide glucking along the
bows, surely to the mariner the sweetest of all sounds when he lies in
benign weather moving home upon the sigh of God.

Black Duncan but wanted a good listener. He was not quite the world's
traveller he would have Gilian believe; but he had voyaged in many
outlandish parts and a Skyeman's memory is long and his is the isle
where fancy riots. He made his simple ventures round the coast voyages
terrible and unending. The bays, the water-mouths, the rocks, the bosky
isles--he clothed them with delights, and made them float in the haze
wherein a boy untravelled would envelop them.

"There's a story I know." said Gilian, "of a young son who went to a
town where the king of Erin bides, an