the dark figures dancing around their brims! But
yet more unforgettable was the smell of the burning kelp had been more
than enough--that acrid, all-permeating, unforgettable odour. His
mother had never been able to endure it. When the wind drove the smoke
from the beach, she would shut every door and window, and build up
every crevice with a barricade of sandbags; all in vain. It crept into
the house, choking the besieged, causing their eyes to smart and their
heads to ache, and scenting clothes, linen, furniture. Even the food
tasted of it.

The kelp-making, however, was but a memory now, though a pungent one. A
night's work at the kiln produced from two to three hundred-weight, and
the price in the good seasons ranged from L4 to L5 a ton; so many
shared the labour that a family had much ado to earn L10 in a whole
season. Under such conditions, too, the work was roughly done. Too
often the sides of the kiln would fall in and the sand--always the
curse of Saaron--would mingle with the kelp and spoil it. And when some
wiser folk in Scotland learned to prepare it under cover, in ovens with
paved floors, the Islanders lost their market, almost in a single
season.

Tregarthen could recall the kelp-making, but neither the circumstances
of the collapse nor the sufferings that followed it. Children observe
the toil, but are usually quite blind to the troubles of their elders.
He only knew that the poorer families almost of a sudden drifted away
from Saaron, that he and his father and mother were left alone on the
island, that his father had begun to busy himself with farming and
required his help, and that in consequence he was released from
lessons. His mother, a farmer's daughter from Holy Vale in St.
Lide's--the one nook in the Islands where you lost sight and almost
sound of the sea, and could look out of window upon green trees--was a
better-most person and something of a scholar. (The Tregarthens had
always gone to the main island for their wives.) She taught the boy to
read, to write a little, and even to cipher up sums in addition and
subtraction. Also she took him over to Brefar to church on every fine
Sunday and taught him his catechism, on the chance (often rumoured)
that the Bishop would come across from the mainland to hold a
Confirmation. But the Bishop of those days had a weak stomach, and, on
the advice of his doctor, kept postponing the voyage.

Thus the boy grew up into a strong, slow man, gentle of mann