“But you are an old woman to be doing this man’s work, and a strong man’s work at that,” I Page 15

insisted.

Again she seemed to immerse herself in that atmosphere of contemplative eternity, and so strangely did it affect me that I should not have been surprised to have awaked a century or so later and found her just beginning to enunciate her reply -

“The work hoz tull be done, an’ I am beholden tull no one.”

“But have you no children, no family, relations?”

“Oh, aye, a-plenty o’ them, but they no see fut tull be helpun’ me.”

She drew out her pipe for a moment, then added, with a nod of her head toward the house, “I luv’

wuth meself.”

I glanced at the house, straw-thatched and commodious, at the large stable, and at the large array

of fields I knew must belong with the place.

“It is a big bit of land for you to farm by yourself.”

“Oh, aye, a bug but, suvunty acres. Ut kept me old mon buzzy, along wuth a son an’ a hired mon,

tull say naught o’ extra honds un the harvest an’ a maid-servant un the house.”

She clambered into the cart, gathered the reins in her hands, and quizzed me with her keen, shrewd eyes.

“Belike ye hail from over the watter - Ameruky, I’m meanun’?”

“Yes, I’m a Yankee,” I answered.

SAMUEL

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4

“Ye wull no be findun’ mony Island McGill folk stoppun’ un Ameruky?”

“No; I don’t remember ever meeting one, in the States.”

She nodded her head.

Page 16

“They are home-luvun’ bodies, though I wull no be sayin’ they are no fair-travelled. Yet they come home ot the last, them oz are no lost ot sea or kult by fevers an’ such-like un foreign parts.”

“Then your sons will have gone to sea and come home again?” I queried.

“Oh, aye, all savun’ Samuel oz was drownded.”

At the mention of Samuel I could have sworn to a strange light in her eyes, and it seemed to me, as by some telepathic flash, that I divined in her a tremendous wistfulness, an immense yearning.

It seemed to me that here was the key to her inscrutableness, the clue that if followed properly would make all her strangeness plain. It came to me that here was a contact and that for the moment I was glimpsing into the soul of her. The question was tickling on my tongue, but she forestalled me.

She tchk’d to the horse, and with a “Guid day tull you, sir,” drove off.

A simple, homely people are the folk of Island McGill, and I doubt if a more sober, thrifty, and industrious folk is to be found in all the world. Meeting them abroad - and to meet them abroad

one must meet them on the sea, for a hybrid sea-faring and farmer breed are they - one would never take them to be Irish. Irish they claim to be, speaking of the North of Ireland with pride and sneering at their Scottish brothers; yet Scotch they undoubtedly are, transplanted Scotch of long ago, it is true, but none the less Scotch, with a thousand traits, to say nothing of their tricks of speech and woolly utterance, which nothing less than their Scotch clannishness could have preserved to this late day.

A narrow loch, scarcely half a mile wide, separates Island McGill from the mainland of Ireland; and, once across this loch, one finds himself in an entirely different country. The Scotch impression is strong, and the people, to commence with, are Presbyterians. When it is considered

that there is no public-house in all the island and that seven thousand souls dwell therein, some idea may be gained of the temperateness of the community. Wedded to old ways, public Page 17

opinion

and the ministers are powerful influences, while fathers and mothers are revered and obeyed as in few other places in this modern world. Courting lasts never later than ten at night, and no girl walks out with her young man without her parents’ knowledge and consent.

The young men go down to the sea and sow their wild oats in the wicked ports, returning periodically, between voyages, to live the old intensive morality, to court till ten o’clock, to sit under the minister each Sunday, and to listen at home to the same stern precepts that the elders preached to them from the time they were laddies. Much they learned of women in the ends of the earth, these seafaring sons, yet a canny wisdom was theirs and they never brought wives home with them. The one solitary exception to this had been the schoolmaster, who had been SAMUEL

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5

guilty of bringing a wife from half a mile the other side of the loch. For this he had never been forgiven, and he rested under a cloud for the remainder of his days. At his death the wife went back across the loch to her own people, and the blot on the escutcheon of Island McGill was erased. In the end the sailor-men married girls of their own homeland and settled down to become exemplars of all the virtues for which the island was noted.

Island McGill was without a history. She boasted none of the events that go to make history.

There had never been any wearing of the green, any Fenian conspiracies, any land disturbances.