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The man who kept the ferry-house was often enough in the custom of staying up all night to meet belated boats from Kilcatrine; we were gentrice and good customers, so he composed himself in a lug chair and dovered in a little room opening off ours, while we sat fingering the book. Our voices as we called the cartes seemed now and then to me like a discourtesy to the peace and order of the night.
M'Iver stooped and took the proffered hand. "Master Gordon," he said, "I would sooner be liked and loved than only admired; that's, perhaps, the secret of my life." It was not the fishing season, but the street thronged with fishers from Kenmore and Cairndhu and Kilcatrine and the bays of lower Cowal.
"Man! but they're throng to-day; the place is fair botching with them." Gilian expressed some commonplace and left the shelter of the pend close and went up the street round the factor's corner. He looked behind him there. The ferry-boat from Kilcatrine was in.
When it came to the bit, he turned the holy-water font of Kilcatrine blue-stone upside-down, scooped a hole in the bottom, and used the new hollow for Protestant baptism. 'There's such a throng about heaven's gate, said he, 'that it's only a mercy to open two; and he was a good and humour-some Protestant-Papist till the day he went under the flagstones of his chapel upbye."
Up the street some men sat on the Cross steps waiting the coming of the ferry-boat from Kilcatrine, for it was the day of the weekly paper. Old Islay went from corner to corner, looking eager out to sea, his hands deep in the pockets of his long coat. Major McNicol put his head cautiously out at his door that his servant lass held open and scanned the deadly world where Frenchmen lay in ambush.
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