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There is another subject for a picture for you, my friend Claude: but your gayer fancy will prefer the scene just as you are sketching it now, as still and bright as if this coast had never seen the bay darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking across the waves before the northern gale; and the tiny herring-boats fleeing from their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercy even from those iron walls of rock than from the pitiless howling waste of spray behind them; and that merry beach beside the town covered with shrieking women and old men casting themselves on the pebbles in fruitless agonies of prayer, as corpse after corpse swept up at the feet of wife and child, till in one case alone a single dawn saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over those who had gone out the night before in the fulness of strength and courage.
There was no lifeboat within eight miles, so we harnessed two horses to a pair of the ordinary wheels used to launch herring-boats after the winter is over, and we took one of the smaller sort of trouting-boats with us. When we reached the Point the men from the south were there, and my young friend was among them. All were excited, for the brig was fighting her way still through the awful sea.
Stornaway is a little fishing-town with a beautiful harbour, from out of which was sailing, as we entered, a fleet of herring-boats, their brown sails gleaming like gold against the dark angry water as they fluttered out to sea, unmindful of the leaden clouds banked up along the west, and all the symptoms of an approaching gale.
Soon we began to hear the soft murmur of the snowy surf line; then the merry voices of the children along the shore; and running straight for the cliff-foot, we shipped into the little pier, from whence the red-sailed herring-boats were swarming forth like bees out of a hive, full of gay handsome faces, and all the busy blue-jacketed life of seaport towns, to their night's fishing in the bay.
Or, again, and this was at twilight, waiting under the old crucifix for the herring-boats to come in: "Anybody with eyesight can imitate the actual. The real! What has the creative mind to do with that? It is not one great and innocent-minded girl you are to represent in Marguerite, it is all girlhood in its innocence and surrender."
All the dues on the herring-boats and the two whalers, on which Grisell had reckoned for the winter needs, were pledged to Sunderland merchants for armour and weapons; the colts running wild on the moors were hastily caught, and reduced to a kind of order by rough breaking in.
Why, it is to them and to their wise laws that we owe much of the freedom, coupled with the order, that prevails in our happy land; and didn't they cross the Atlantic Ocean in things little better than herring-boats, without chart or compass, and discover America long before Columbus was born?"
And not without reason did they think so, for I'll assure ye I would have been loth to swear whether it was spray or tears that made my cheeks so salt when I saw the bit herring-boats stealing away out into the blue mist, for all the world as if they were laddies leaving home to seek their fortunes, as it might be ourselves.
Here Kingsley spent most of his boyhood, and hither flock the artists to paint odd pictures for almost every British art-exhibition. Its little pier was built in Richard II.'s time, when as now it was a landing-place for the mackerel-and herring-boats. This quay has recently been somewhat enlarged.
The children bought some potatoes the other day wrapped up in brown paper quite a big portion for two sous and said they were very good. The quais are very broad, happily, for everything is put there. One morning there were quantities of barrels. I asked what was in them. Salt, they told me, for the herring-boats which are starting these days.
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