: the place was rightly peopled--and now belongs not to me but to
my puppets--for a time at least. In time, perhaps, the puppets will
grow faint; the original memory swim up instant as ever; and I shall
once more lie in bed, and see the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it
is in nature, and the child (that once was me) wading there in
butterburrs; and wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness of that
memory; and be pricked again, in season and out of season, by the desire
to weave it into art.

There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me.
I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and later on, threw upon
its shores, and condemned to several days of rain and shellfish on its
tumbled boulders, the hero of another. The ink is not yet faded; the
sound of the sentences is still in my mind's ear; and I am under a spell
to write of that island again.

I

The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner of the
Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one side, across which you may see
the isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the other, where you
shall be able to mark on a clear surfy day the breakers running white on
many sunken rocks. I first saw it, or first remember seeing it, framed
in the round bull's-eye of a cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its
shores like the waters of a lake, the colourless, clear light of the
early morning making plain its heathery and rocky hummocks. There stood
upon it, in those days, a single rude house of uncemented stones,
approached by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it
was then summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely
withdraws; but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of
peats which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of
the cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited the shores
of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole,
sounding as we went; and, having taken stock of all possible
accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of operations.
For it was no accident that had brought the lighthouse steamer to anchor
in the Bay of Earraid. Fifteen miles away to seaward, a certain black
rock stood environed by the Atlantic rollers, the outpost of the Torran
reefs. Here was a tower to be built, and a star lighted, for the conduct
of seamen. But as the rock was small, and hard of access, and far from
land, the work wou