Irish--a people of whom she had a low opinion--(Mr. Melville had been an
Irishman)--but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some
disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for this exiled Boxer who had tried to
get a little homely pleasure. Ellen found it not altogether Grantown's
gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of
fishers' cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith.
Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out
into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought
to the mind's eye men's bare chests and muscle-knotted arms,
round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome
death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and
the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves.

From either of these places they sailed across the Firth: an arm of the
sea that could achieve anything from an end-of-the-world desolation,
when there was snow on the shores and the water rolled black shining
mountains, to a South Seasish bland and tidy presentation of white and
green islands enamelled on a blue channel under a smooth summer sky.
Most often, for it was the cheapest trip, they crossed to Aberlady,
where the tall trees stood at the sea's edge, and one could sit on
seaweedy rocks in the shadow of green leaves. Last time they had gone it
had been one of the "fairs," and men and women were dancing on the lawns
that lay here and there among the wooded knolls. Ellen had sat with her
feet in a pool and watched the dances over her shoulder. "Mummie," she
had said, "we belong to a nation which keeps all its lightness in its
feet," and Mrs. Melville had made a sharp remark like the ping of a
mosquito about the Irish. Sometimes they would walk along a lane by the
beach to Burntisland. There was nothing good about that except the name,
and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt
might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the