uncle's man, Rorie, an old servant of the Macleans, who had transferred

his services without afterthought on the occasion of the marriage. There

was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie, that dwelt and did

business in some fearful manner of his own among the boiling breakers of

the Roost. A mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag beach, and there

sang to him a long, bright midsummer's night, so that in the morning he

was found stricken crazy, and from thenceforward, till the day he died,

said only one form of words; what they were in the original Gaelic I

cannot tell, but they were thus translated: 'Ah, the sweet singing out of

the sea.' Seals that haunted on that coast have been known to speak to

man in his own tongue, presaging great disasters. It was here that a

certain saint first landed on his voyage out of Ireland to convert the

Hebrideans. And, indeed, I think he had some claim to be called saint;

for, with the boats of that past age, to make so rough a passage, and

land on such a ticklish coast, was surely not far short of the

miraculous. It was to him, or to some of his monkish underlings who had

a cell there, that the islet owes its holy and beautiful name, the House

of God.

Among these old wives' stories there was one which I was inclined to hear

with more credulity. As I was told, in that tempest which scattered the

ships of the Invincible Armada over all the north and west of Scotland,

one great vessel came ashore on Aros, and before the eyes of some

solitary people on a hill-top, went down in a moment with all hands, her

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