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When the Curlew was abreast of Inganess, Willie Slater, the lookout man at the bow, reported a ship in sight; and as my uncle Mansie lighted a rude torch, made of old rope steeped in the oil of sea birds, my father peered into the darkness and saw a large barque heading towards the land. The blazing light of the torch was presently waved as a warning signal to those on the ship.
No head is turned; not a squeeze is missed this is business here in the stall, but as the car stops behind the scene, Babe calls "Hello, Father!" "Hello, Babe!" "Three teats done," calls Mansie, his head down, butting into the old cow's flank. "You go right in, we 'll be there. She has n't kicked but once!"
Looking round, I saw to my great surprise a very tall, powerful man, who was standing a few yards off, and who, instead of looking at me, was ignoring my existence completely, and was gazing over my head with a stern set face at the bay and the black line of the Mansie reef.
Bud Mansie, meager, lean, with a shifting eye; Garry Patterson, of the red, good-natured face; Phil Branch, stolid and short and muscled like a giant; Handsome Dick Wilbur on his racing bay; Black Gandil, with his villainies from the South Seas like an invisible mantle of awe about him; and her father, the stalwart, gray Boone.
The commonplaces of life and death are not commonplace when they befall ourselves. It was in desperate hurry and agitation that Mansie Waueh saw his vision; and in like circumstances you may have yours too. But for the most part such moods come in leisure in saunterings through the autumn woods in reveries by the winter fire.
In the largest habitable room they found a fire fed with rotten timbers from the wrecked portion of the building, and scattered through the room a sullen and dejected group: Mansie, Branch, Jim Boone, and Black Morgan Gandil. At a glance it was easy to detect their malady; it was the horrible ennui which comes to men who are always surrounded by one set of faces.
Ah, there is exquisite pathos there, as well as humor; but the thing for which I have quoted that sentence is its startling truthfulness. You have all done what Mansie Wauch did, I know.
How often have I sat down on the mossy wall that surrounded my churchyard, when I had more time for reverie than I have now, sat upon the mossy wall, under a great oak, whose branches came low down and projected far out, and looked at the rough gnarled bark, and at the pacing river, and at the belfry of the little church, and there and then thought of Mansie Wauch and of his vision of Future Years!
There was such a noise and hullabaloo in the streets, as if the Day of Judgment had come to find us all unprepared. Notwithstanding, we behaved ourselves like true-blue Scotsmen, called forth to fight the battles of our country, and if the French had come, as they did not come, they would have found that to their cost, as sure as my name is Mansie.
The noise of the storm raging outside the wind and rain beating on the windows, and the sound of the waves breaking against the cliffs brought the two men to talk about the ships that had from time to time been wrecked on our neighbouring coast. Said Mansie: "'Twas on a night like this d'ye mind, Colin? that the Undine went to pieces on the Gaulton Craigs."
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