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