beat time to the
bells on their necks, the fresh west wind blew a cloud of white dust
away over the moorland behind them, there was a blue sky shining all
around them, and the blue Atlantic basking in the light.

They stopped for a few minutes at both the hamlets of Suainabost and
Tabost to allow Sheila to pay a hurried visit to one or two of the huts,
while Mackenzie, laying hold of some of the fishermen he knew, got them
to show Lavender the curing-houses, in which the young gentleman
professed himself profoundly interested. They also visited the
school-house, and Lavender found himself beginning to look upon a
two-storied building with windows as something imposing and a decided
triumph of human skill and enterprise. But what was the school-house of
Tabost to the grand building at the Butt? They had driven away from the
high-road by a path leading through long and sweet-smelling pastures of
Dutch clover; they had got up from these sandy swathes to a table-land
of rock; and here and there they caught glimpses of fearful precipices
leading sheer down to the boiling and dashing sea. The curious
contortions of the rocks, the sharp needles of them springing in
isolated pillars from out of the water, the roar of the eddying currents
that swept through the chasms and dashed against the iron-bound shore,
the wild sea-birds that flew about and screamed over the rushing waves
and the surge, naturally enough drew the attention of the strangers
altogether away from the land; and it was with a start of surprise they
found themselves before an immense mass of yellow stone-work--walls,
house and tower--that shone in the sunlight. And here were the
light-house-keeper and his wife, delighted to see strange faces and most
hospitably inclined; insomuch that Lavender, who cared little for
luncheon at any time, was constrained to take as much bread and cheese
and butter and whisky as would have made a ploughman's dinner. It was a
strange sort of meal this, away out at the end of the world, as it were.
The snug little room might have been in the Marylebone road: there were
photographs about, a gay label on the whisky-bottle, and other signs of
an advanced civilization; but outside nothing but the wild precipices of
the coast, a surging sea that seemed almost to surround the place, the
wild screaming of the sea-birds, and a single ship appearing like a mere
speck on the northern horizon.

They had not noticed the wind much as they drove