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.

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, gray, 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-front of the isle,
all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt