in the old days the soil had been fertile, and that either
the sand, which drove across it in the prevailing westerly winds,
devastating every green herb, had started its invasion within the last
hundred years or so, or that his forerunners had possessed and lost
some art of coping with it. He had trenched the sand in many places on
the southern and easterly slopes of the two hills into which the Island
was divided, and along the valley between them, and everywhere, at the
depth of two feet or less, the spade found a fine, strong clay, capable
of carrying any crop.

Young Farmer Tregarthen in his slow way pondered a deal over this and
similar problems. Indeed, you might say that in one sense the Island
was never out of his thoughts. He had been born on it. At the age of
sixteen he had succeeded to the farm (though it was nominally leased to
his mother), and to the fight which his father had begun--the warfare
which his enemy, the sand, never allowed him to relax. He could almost
remember his father resuming it and repairing the stone hedges which
enclosed the old fields. In those days Saaron had supported, or failed
to support, five families; but of these all but Tregarthen had lost
their clutch on the barren rock and drifted away to other islands. He
could remember their going. He passed their roofless cottages half a
dozen times a day.

They had subsisted mainly by kelp-making and piloting, helped out (it
is to be feared) by more than a little smuggling. There were
conclusions to be drawn from the cellars in the farmhouse, too ample
for the needs of a small farmer. Tregarthen had a shrewd notion that
most of the guineas which his mother had hoarded in a stocking had come
at one time or another from the contraband trade; also he had a notion
that his father's renewed activities in digging and hedging must have
coincided pretty accurately with the building of the coastguard station
upon St. Lide's and the arrival of a Divisional Officer. But if
smuggling flourished once, it had fallen on evil days, and its secrets
had been hidden from his childhood. Also about that time the pilotage
had decayed in competition with the licensed pilots on St. Ann's, and
but a few hovelling jobs in and about Cromwell's Sound fell to the
share of the men of Saaron. (He could recall discussions and injurious
words, half-understood at the time, faint echoes of that old quarrel
between the two islands.)

But the kelp-making had been in ful