hames; but a five minutes' stroll into the country brought us face to
face with a world of colossal desolations, compared with which the
scenery of Scapa Flow is suburban. The little houses of Westray were, at
all events, unmistakably houses. The crofters' huts, almost within a
stone's throw of Tarbet, many of them oval in shape, are like
exhalations of rounded stones and heather. We felt, as we gravely looked
at them, that we were back again in the Stone Age. In the island of
North Ouist we were visited by the same illusion. The landing stage was,
indeed, a scene of crowded life; but the life was the life of sea birds,
which were hardly disturbed by our approach. Leaving North Ouist, we
passed the mounded shores of Benbecula, the island where Prince Charlie
once lived as a fugitive, and where the islanders, all of them Catholics
(as they still are to-day), sang songs in his honor which, without
betraying his name, called him "the fair-haired herdsman." Far off on an
eminence we could just distinguish the glimmerings of a Catholic church,
in which, with strange ceremonies, St. Michael is still worshiped. South
Ouist, dominated by the great mountain of Hecla, likewise holds a
population whose Catholicism has never been broken. Facing the landing
stage is an inn obtrusively modern in aspect, and a little colony of
slate-roofed villas to match; but here, as at Tarbet, a few steps
brought us into realms of mystery. Having strayed along an inland road
which wavered among heaths and peat hags and gray boulders, we saw at a
distance some building of hewn sandstone, and presently there emerged
from its interior a solitary human being. For a moment he scrutinized
our approach, and then, like a timid animal, before we could make him
out, he was gone. When we reached the building we found that it was a
little Catholic schoolhouse, and that the door was hermetically closed.
I tried the effect of a few very gentle knocks, and these proved so
ingratiating that the inmate at last showed himself. He was the
schoolmaster--a youngish man, perhaps rather more than thirty. Finding
us not formidable, he had no objection to talking, though he still was
oddly shy. He told us what he could, in answer to some questions which
we put to him. I cannot remember what he said, but I remember his eyes
and the gentle modulations of his voice. They were those of a man living
in a world of dreams, for whom the outer world was as remote, and the
inner world