ran out into the darker waters of the sea, with their summits shining with the bright sea-grass.  Here, close at hand, were warm meadows, with calves and lambs cropping the sweet-scented Dutch clover.  A few huts, shaped like beehives, stood by the roadside, close by some deep peat cuttings.  There was a cutting in the yellow sand of the bay for the pulling up of captured whales.  Now and again you could see a solan dart down from the blue heavens into the blue of the sea, sending up a spurt of water twenty feet high as he disappeared; and far out there, between the red precipices and the ruffled waters beneath, white sea-fowl flew from crag to crag or dropped down upon the sea to rise and fall with the waves.

At the small hamlet of Gress they got a large rowing-boat manned by sturdy fishermen, and set out to explore the great caves formed in the mighty wall of conglomerate that here fronts the sea.  The wild-fowl flew about them, screaming and yelling at being disturbed.  The long swell of the sea lifted the boat, passed from under it, and went on with majestic force to crash on the glowing red crags and send jets of foam flying up the face of them.  They captured one of the sea-birds—­a young thing about as big as a hen, with staring eyes, scant feathers, and a long beak with which it instinctively tried to bite its enemies—­and the parents of it kept swooping down over the boat, uttering shrill cries, until their offspring was restored to the surface of the water.  They went into the great loud-sounding caverns, getting a new impression of the extraordinary clearness of the sea-water by the depth at which the bottom was visible; and here their shouts occasionally called up from some dim twilight recess, far in among the perilous rocks, the head of a young seal, which would instantly dive again and be seen no more.  They watched the salmon splash in the shallower creeks where the sea had scooped out a tiny bay of ruddy sand, and then a slowly rolling porpoise would show his black back above the water and silently disappear again.  All this was pleasant enough on a pleasant morning, in fresh sea-air and sunlight, in holiday-time; and was there any reason, Mackenzie may fairly have thought, why this young man, if he did marry Sheila, should not come and live in a place where so much healthy amusement was to be found?

And in the evening, too, when they had climbed to the top of the hills on the south of Stornoway harbor, did not the little town look sufficiently picturesque, with its white houses, its shipping, its great castle and plantations lying in shadow under the green of the eastern sky?  Then away to the west what a strange picture presented itself!  Thick bands of gray cloud lay across the sky, and the sunlight from behind them sent down great rays of misty yellow on the endless miles of moor.  But how was it that, as these shafts of sunlight struck on the far and successive ridges of the moorland, each long undulation seemed to become transparent, and all the island appeared to consist of great golden-brown shells heaped up behind each other, with the sunlight shining through?