ious islands changed every minute as the wild clouds whirled past.
Already the great cliffs about Dare had grown distant and faint as seen
through the spray; and here were the rocks of Colonsay, black as jet as
they reappeared through the successive deluges of white foam; and far
over there, a still gloomier mass against the gloomy sky told where the
huge Atlantic breakers were rolling in their awful thunder into the
Staffa caves.

"I would keep her away a bit," said the sailor next Macleod. He did not
like the look of the heavy breakers that were crashing on to the
Colonsay rocks.

Macleod, with his teeth set hard against the wind, was not thinking of
the Colonsay rocks more than was necessary to give them a respectful
berth.

"Were you ever in a theatre, Duncan?" he said, or rather bawled, to the
brown-visaged and black-haired young fellow who had now got the sheet of
the lugsail under his foot as well as in the firm grip of his hands.

"Oh yes, Sir Keith," said he, as he shook the salt-water away from his
short beard. "It was at Greenock. I will be at the theatre, and more
than three times or two times."

"How would you like to have a parcel of actors and actresses with us
now?" he said, with a laugh.

"'Deed, I would not like it at all," said Duncan, seriously; and he
twisted the sheet of the sail twice round his right wrist, so that his
relieved left hand could convey a bit of wet tobacco to his mouth. "The
women they would chump apout, and then you do not know what will happen
at all."

"A little bit away yet, sir!" cried out the other sailor, who was
looking out to windward, with his head between the gunwale and the sail.
"There is a bad rock off the point."

"Why, it is half a mile north of our course as we are now going!"
Macleod said.

"Oh yes, half a mile!" the man said to himself; "but I do not like half
miles, and half miles, and half miles on a day like this!"

And so they went plunging and staggering and bounding onward, with the
roar of the water all around them, and the foam at her bows, as it
sprung high into the air, showing quite white against the black sky
ahead. The younger lad, Duncan, was clearly of opinion that his master
was running too near the shores of Colonsay; but he would say no more,
for he knew that Macleod had a better knowledge of the currents and
rocks of this wild coast than any man on the mainland of Mull. John
Cameron, forward, kept his head down to the gunwale, his e