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This was Saint Conan’s Landing, and it occurred to me that if the holy man came in rough weather from the Irish coast he required, in truth, all the perspicacity of a saint to get his boat in without having it impaled on these devil’s needles.

There was no garden to speak of about the house. It was grown up like the moor. Two or three images of Buddhas stood about in it; one of them was quite large – three feet in height I should say at a guess. They were on rough stone pedestals. I examined them carefully. They were all defective; the large one had an immense flaw in the shoulder. The gorse nearly covered them; the unkept hedge let the moor in and there were no longer any paths, except one running to the boathouse.

I did not follow the path. But I looked down at the boathouse with some interest. This was the building that my uncle had turned into a sort of foundry for his weird experiments. There was a big lock on the door and a coal-blacked chimney standing above the roof.

It was afternoon. The whole coast about me was like an undiscovered country. I hardly knew in what direction to set out on my exploration. I stood in the path digging my stick into the gravel and undecided. Finally I determined to cross the bit of moor to the high ground overlooking the loch. It was the sloping base of one of the great peaks and purple with heather. It looked the best point for a full sweep of the sea and the coast.

I jumped the hedge and set out across the moor to the high ground.

There was no path through the gorse, but when I reached the heather where the foot of the mountain peak descended into the loch there was a sort of newly broken trail. The heather was high and dense and I followed the trail onto the high ground overlooking the sweep of the coast.

The loch was dappled with sun. The air was like wine. The mountains above the moor and the heather were colored like an Oriental carpet. I was full of the joy of life and swung into an immense stride, when suddenly a voice stopped me.

“My lad,” it said, “which one of the Ten Commandments is it the most dangerous to break?”

Before me, at the end of the trail, seated on the ground, was a big Highlander. He was knitting a woolen stocking and his needles were clicking like an instrument. I was taken off my feet, but I tried to meet him on his ground.

“Well,” I answered, “I suppose it would be the one against murder, the sixth.”

“You suppose wrong,” he replied. “It will be the first. You will read in the Book how Jehovah set aside the sixth. Aye, my lad, He ordered it broken when it pleased Him. But did you ever read that He set aside the first or that any man escaped who broke it?”

He spoke with the deep rich burr of his race and with a structure of speech that I cannot reproduce here.

“Did you observe,” he added, “the graven images that your uncle has set up? . . . Where is the man the noo?”

“He is gone to Oban,” I said.

He sprang up and thrust the stocking and needles into his sporran.

“To Oban!” He stood a moment in some deep reflection. “There will be ships out of Oban.” Then he put another question to me:

“What did auld Andrew say about it?”

“That my uncle was gone to Oban,” I answered, “and had set no time for his return.”

He looked at me queerly for a moment, towering above me in the deep heather.

“Do you think, my lad, that your uncle could be setting out for heathen parts to learn the witch words for his hell business in the boathouse?”

The suggestion startled me. The thing was not beyond all possibility.