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This crowded museum of birds, beasts, and fish skarts, goosanders, sand-grouse, terns, eagles, ospreys, squirrels, foxes, big-snouted trout, harts, hinds, bucks, does, owls, kestrels, falcons, merlins, and every variety of the common gull shot by the all-pervading Cockney staring, stuffed, silent, they were a confusion to the eyes, and nowhere could he find his own, his particular, his precious stag.
"Man, Ogilvie," he said, in a burst of confidence, "I never knew before how fearfully lonely a life we lead here. If we were out on one of the Treshanish Islands, with nothing round us but skarts and gulls, we could scarcely be lonelier. And I have been thinking all the morning what this must look like to you."
It was only the seething white beneath their feet and the hoarse thunder along the coast that told of the force of this summer-like sea; and for the rest the picture was light and calm and beautiful; but there the black rocks basked in the sunlight, the big skarts standing here and there on their ledges, not moving a feather.
But meanwhile Macleod was greatly concerned to find his sweetheart so cold and distant; and it was all in vain that he pointed out to her the beauties of this summer day that he showed her the various islands he had often talked about, and called her attention to the skarts sitting on the Erisgeir rocks, and asked her seeing that she sometimes painted a little in water-color whether she noticed the peculiar, clear, intense, and luminous blue of the shadows in the great cliffs which they were approaching.
And as the slow time passed in the glare of the sunlight, Staffa lay on the still water a dense mass of shadow; and they went by Lunga; and they drew near to the point of Gometra, where the black skarts were sitting on the exposed rocks. It was like a dream of sunlight, and fair colors, and summer quiet.
Curlews and sandpipers whistled on the shore, complaining sea-mews sailed overhead, and the low-lying skerries outside were swarming with "skarts" and other frequenters of the wild north. "Oh, what a funny face!" exclaimed Junkie, as a great seal rose head and shoulders out of the sea, not fifty yards off, to look at them. Its observations induced it to sink promptly.
The fair heavens shone over the windy blue seas; and the green island of Ulva lay basking in the sunlight, and as the old Umpire, with her heavy bows parting the rushing waves, carried them out to the west, they could see the black skarts standing on the rocks of Gometra, and clouds of puffins wheeling round the dark and lonely pillars of Staffa; while away in the north, as they got clear of Treshanish Point, the mountains of Rum and of Skye appeared a pale and spectral blue, like ghostly shadows at the horizon.
And the great skarts on the shores of Erisgeir are spreading abroad their dusky wings to get them dried in the sun; and the seals are basking on the rocks in Loch-na-Keal; and in Loch Scridain the white gulls sit buoyant on the blue sea.
"But that costs but twa skarts of a pen," said Lord Turntippet; "and surely there is nae noble lord that will presume to say that I, wha hae complied wi' a' compliances, taen all manner of tests, adjured all that was to be abjured, and sworn a' that was to be sworn, for these thirty years bye-past, sticking fast by my duty to the state through good report and bad report, shouldna hae something now and then to synd my mouth wi' after sic drouthy wark?
Beyond, as if floating on the calm water, numerous rocky islets formed the playground of innumerable gulls, skarts, seals, loons, and other inhabitants of the wild north; but only to the sense of vision were their varied activities perceptible.
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