The Merry Men

CHAPTER I. EILEAN AROS.

IT WAS a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on
foot for the last time for Aros. A boat had put me ashore the
night before at Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn
afforded, and, leaving all my baggage till I had an occasion to
come round for it by sea, struck right across the promontory with a
cheerful heart.

I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did,
from an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle of mine, Gordon
Darnaway, after a poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had
married a young wife in the islands; Mary Maclean she was called,
the last of her family; and when she died in giving birth to a
daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had remained in his possession.
It brought him in nothing but the means of life, as I was well
aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued; he feared,
cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh adventure
upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny.
Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought neither
help nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the
lowlands; there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my
father was the luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last
to die, but he left a son to his name and a little money to support
it. I was a student of Edinburgh University, living well enough at
my own charges, but without kith or kin; when some news of me found
its way to Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was
a man who held blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he
heard of my existence, and taught me to count Aros as my home.
Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations in that part of the
country, so far from all society and comfort, between the codfish
and the moorcocks; and thus it was that now, when I had done with
my classes, I was returning thither with so light a heart that July
day.

The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but
as rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of
it, full of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen - all
overlooked from the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great
peals of Ben Kyaw. THE MOUNTAIN OF THE MIST, they say the words
signify in the Gaelic tongue; and it is well named. For that hill-
top, which is more than three thousand feet in height, catches all
the clouds that come blowing from the seaward; and, indeed, I used
often to think that it must make them for itself; since when all
heaven was clear to the sea level, there would ever be a streamer
on Ben Kyaw. It brought water, too, and was mossy (1) to the top
in consequence. I have seen us sitting in broad sunshine