rosy-fingered turned up, they'd
have been quicker getting under way, and would have got home sooner in
the end. How much superior were the Fingalian heroes; they would sail
and fight all day and pass round the uisquebaugh in the evening at the
feast of shells, and never get fuddled and never feared anything under
water or above land, and were beholden to neither Gods nor men.

But I did once know a descendant of theirs, in their own country who was
overcome by red wine. "It was perfectly excusable," he said, for he had
never tasted it before--or since! He was a fine, tall man called Callum
Bhouie, from his yellow hair when he was a youth; he was old when I knew
him--six feet two and thin as a rake and strong, with the face of
Wellington and an eye like a hawk. He and his friend were going home to
his croft from their occupations one morning early, round the little
Carsaig Bay opposite Jura, where he had a still up a little burn there,
and they fell in with a cask on the sand and there was red wine in it,
port or Burgundy, I do not know. Callum said he knew all about it and it
was but weak stuff, so they took bowls and saucers and drank the weak
stuff more and more. I think it must have been port; and they lay where
they were on the sand and slept till the morning after. When dawn, the
rosy-fingered, found them she must have thought them quite Hellenic; and
the minister followed later, and I would not think it right to repeat
what he thought it right to say. The sands and the bay and the burn are
there to-day, and, as they say in the old tales, if Callum were not dead
he would be alive to prove the truth of the story. The still I've never
seen, but Callum I knew, and his croft; alas the roof of it fell in a
few years ago; and it was the last inhabited house of a Carsaig clachan.
You see the land is "improved" now, for sheep, and it's all in one big
farm instead of small crofts, and little greasy, black-faced sheep climb
the loose stone walls and nibble the green grass short as a carpet where
Callum and his wife lived so long.

May I go on to the end of Callum's story; though it is rather a far cry
from this hot Red Sea to the cool Sound of Jura?

He and his wife were to be taken to the poor house in winter, and on the
long drive across Kintyre they were told that they would be separated,
and there was then and there such a crying and fighting on the road that
they were both driven back to the croft--and I was not surpri