l swing; and the business had a
plenty of mystery and picturesqueness to bite it upon a child's memory.
All the summer through, day after day, at low water, the Islanders
would be out upon the beaches cutting the ore-weed and dragging it in
sledges up the foreshore, where they strewed it above high-water mark,
to dry in the sun. On sunny days they scattered and turned it, on wet
days they banked it into heaps almost as tall as arrish-mows. From
morning until evening they laboured, and towards midsummer, as the near
beaches became denuded, would tail away, in twos and threes, and whole
families, to camp among the Off Islands and raid them; until, when
August came and the kelping season drew to an end, boat after boat
would arrive at high-water and discharge its burden.

These operations filled the summer days; but it was towards nightfall
that the real fun began. For then the men, women, and children would
gather and build the kilns--pits scooped in the sand, measuring about
seven feet across and three feet deep in the centre. While the men
finished lining the sides of the kiln with stones, the women and girls
would leap into it with armfuls of furze; which they lighted and so,
strewing the dried ore-weed upon it, built little by little into a
blazing pile. The great sea-lights which ring the Islands now make a
brave show; but (say the older inhabitants) it will not compare with
the illuminations of bygone summer nights, when as many as forty kilns
would be burning together, and island signalling to island with
bonfire-lights that flickered across the roadsteads and danced on the
wild tide-races. From four to five hours the kilns would be kept
burning, and the critical moment came when the mass of kelp began to
liquefy, and word was given to "strike." Then a dozen or fourteen men
would leap down with pitchforks and heave the red molten mass from side
to side of the kiln, toiling like madmen, while the sweat ran shining
down their half-naked bodies; and sometimes--and always on Midsummer
Eve, which is Baal-fire night--while they laboured the women and girls
would join hands and dance round the pit. In ten minutes or so all this
excitement would die out, the dancers unlock their hands the men climb
out of the pit and throw themselves panting on the sand, leaving the
kelp to settle, cool, and vitrify. But while it lasted the boy knew of
no excitement comparable with it. Little wonder that he remembered
those fiery pits with