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 remembered 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
these 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