ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant
assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might
play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the
Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with
an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a dingy insect
between a slater and a bug. No other life was there but that of
sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a mill-race and
growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in the
calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself. Times were
different upon Dhu Heartach when it blew, and the night fell dark, and
the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and
the men sat prisoned high up in their iron drum, that then resounded
with the lashing of the sprays. Fear sat with them in their
sea-beleaguered dwelling; and the colour changed in anxious faces when
some greater billow struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and
sprang under the blow. It was then that the foreman builder, Mr.
Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of
undecipherable rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human
minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only that
I saw Dhu Heartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer
afterglow, that the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an
enchanted sea; the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo,
riding in her wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she
rose on the long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west.

II

But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly. The lighthouse
settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the top of the
first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut out, the face
of things unchanged by any of man's doings. Here was no living presence,
save for the limpets on the rocks, for some old, grey, rain-beaten ram
that I might rouse out of a ferny den betwixt two boulders, or for the
haunting and the piping of the gulls. It was older than man; it was
found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's
priests. The earthy savour of the bog plants, the rude disorder of the
boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and
the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden
springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-fr