Two hundred yards across the smooth, unvexed strait, which slept between its two mighty walls of rock, rose the giant cliffs of Lianacraig, with the ocean-swell passing evenly along their base from end to end--smooth, green steeps of water, dimpled everywhere into knolls and valleys. Seabirds nested up there by thousands. Gillemots sat solemnly in rows like piebald bottles of black and white. Cormorants stood on the lower skerries, shaking their wings for hours together as if they had been performing a religious rite. And here with his gorgeous beak, like a mummer's mask drawn over his ears for sport, waddled the puffin--the bird whose sad fate it is, according to the rhyme, to be forever incapable of amorous dalliance. For have not half a dozen generations been told in rhyme how "Tammy Norrie o' the Bass Canna kiss a bonny lass?" But as Wat looked for a moment away from the white-spotted, lime-washed ledges of Suliscanna to the green-fringed, sandy shores of his own island, he saw that in the water to the north which sent him off at a run. Long ere he reached the beach he had recognized the boat from which John Scarlett and he had been capsized, bobbing quietly up and down at the entrance of the bay. The rebound or "back-spang" of the current from some hidden reef to the northward had turned the boat aside, even as it had done Wat himself with his oar, and there the treasure was almost within his reach. Wat's clothing was still damp from his previous immersion, so that it was no sacrifice to slip it off him and swim out to the boat. Then, laying his hand on the inverted stern, he managed easily enough to push her before him to a shelving beach of sand, where presently, by the aid of a spar of driftwood, he turned her over. To his great joy he found that the little vessel was still fairly water-tight and apparently uninjured, in spite of her rough-and-tumble steeple-chase with the white horses of the Suck of Suliscanna. Wat opened the lockers and saw, as he had expected, that the pistols and powder were useless. But he found, too, Scarlett's sword and his own trusty blade, together with a dagger, all of which he had the satisfaction of polishing there and then with fine sand held in the palm of his hand. Then he swung his sword naked to his belt, and felt himself another man in an instant. The lockers also contained a pair of hams of smoked bacon, which had suffered no damage from the water, and which, so far as sustenance went, would at least serve to tide him over a week or two should he be compelled to remain so long upon the isle. Nevertheless, when Wat sat down to consider his position and plans, he felt that difficulties had indeed closed impenetrably upon him.