It was not. The professor had been right for once, when he called it a genuine savage conception of fate, brought thither by the Gulf Stream. Rick took it up in his hands and looked at it curiously. "I wonder," he said, half to himself, "if things would have been different." Then, with a sort of appeal, he turned to Miss Willina. "Aunt Will--you don't really believe--all that rubbish--do you?" Her answer was decisive. She took the image from him, and marched off with it to Kirsty's peat fire. So that was an end of the tragic comedy of Roederay. When Rick set off to sail the seas, all the actors in it had disappeared, save Miss Willina in the windblown Noah's Ark at Eval. Will Lockhart came back the next summer, and painted a picture of Eilean-a-fa-ash, with a golden sea-haugh hanging over drifted sand, and the skeleton of a hand showing from a stone coffin. It was gruesome and morbid; so it was much admired by the Gulf Stream of society in the Royal Academy. Miss Willina, however, still refused to find entertainment in a magic lantern. The past was sacred, she said, and no good ever came in disbelieving in it. Besides, what would become of her animals? He came again the next summer, bringing with him a tale about the "flusteration midst the bastes of all creation," which followed on the introduction of the "Spirit of fell Denial into the Ark," whereat they both laughed. And that year he sent a picture to the Royal Academy, which a few critics admired. But then, it was only the portrait of a middle-aged woman with a sick gosling on her lap, and half a dozen zoological specimens grouped around her. Yet you could almost feel the northwest wind which was ruffling the coils of hair, and smell the fresh, salt, wholesome breeze which had swept the sand from those dead fingers at Eilean-a-fa-ash. It was the other side of the picture; but it did not suit the public taste so well. _Chacun à son gout_.