United States or Singapore ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The men of Dubh-Artach will have a good laugh when we whisk you past. What! you beg for mercy? come out, then, you poor devil! Here is a tarpaulin for you. Give him a glass of whiskey, John Cameron. And so you know about theatres; and perhaps you have ambition, too; and there is nothing in the world so fine as people clapping their hands?

If she could only reach them, she would be safe. The rose-pink died away from the long promontories, and was succeeded by a sombre gray; the glory in the west sank down; a wan twilight came over the sea and the sky; and a small golden star, like the point of a needle, told where the Dubh-Artach men had lit their beacon for the coming night.

And then, sweetheart, you will go along to Erraidh, and you will go up to the signal-house on the rocks, and we will fire a cannon to tell the men at Dubh-Artach to look out. And what will be the message you will signal to them, Gerty, with the great white boards? Will you send them your compliments, which is the English way? Ah, but I know what they will answer to you.

They rounded the Ross of Mull, and got into the smoother waters of the Sound. Would any of the people in the cottages at Drraidh see this gray ghost of a vessel go gliding past over the dark water? Behind them burned the yellow eye of Dubh-Artach; before them a few small red points told them of the Iona cottages; and still this phantom gray vessel held on her way.

"The Dubh-Artach men would recognize the Umpire at once," Macleod said, abruptly; and then he suggested to Hamish that he should get a little more way on the yacht, so that she might be a trifle steadier when Christina carried the dinner into the English lady's cabin. But indeed there was now little breeze of any kind. Hamish's fears of a dead calm was likely to prove true.

There go the Gometra men in their brown-sailed boat to look after the lobster-traps at Staffa, and very soon you will see the steamer come round the far Cailleach Point; over at Erraidh they are signalling to the men at Dubh-artach, and they are glad to have a message from them after the heavy gale.

Look, now how she has passed through the Sound of Iona; and the white sails are shining in the light; and far away before her, instead of islands with which she is familiar, are other islands another Colonsay altogether, and Islay, and Jura, and Scarba, all a pale transparent blue. And what will the men on the lonely Dubh-Artach rock think of her as they see her pass by?

Oh yes; and I said to myself that your true friends were in the North; and what would the men at Dubh-Artach not do for you, and Captain Macallum too, when they knew you were coming to live at Dare; and I was thinking that would be a grand day when you came to live among us; and there would be dancing, and a good glass of whiskey for every one, and some playing on the pipes that day!