Accordingly, toward the end of July we left London by the night mail for Greenock, where the yacht would be found waiting for us. Next morning, in the freshness of a salt breeze, we were transferring ourselves from Greenock pier to a trim-looking motor boat, which was rising and falling on the swish of unquiet waters, while the yacht--a small streak of whiteness--was pointed out to us lying half a mile away. Besides Mr. and Mrs. Noble, our party consisted of their two children, Miss Helen Marhall, and myself. I had with me a Swiss servant; Mrs. Noble had a French maid, together with her London butler, transformed for the time into a mariner by gilt buttons and a nautical serge suit, and the cook was an accomplished _chef_ who had once been in the service of the fastidious Madame de Falbe. We were all of us good sailors, so for our prospective comfort everything augured well. Our first few days were spent on the calm waters of Loch Fyne. We then went southward, and, doubling the Mull of Cantyre, had some taste of the turbulence of the open sea. We then turned north, and, protected by the outer islands, followed the mainland placidly until we approached Cape Wrath. A large part of our time was spent in a succession of lochs. On our way to Oban, and in its harbor, we saw several large yachts; but, except for occasional fishing smacks, after Oban the sea became more and more deserted. Entering one loch after another in the summer evenings, and seeing no human habitations but crofters' cottages, which, except for their wreaths of smoke, were hardly distinguishable from the heather, and hearing no sound at nightfall, when our own engines were still, except the distant dipping of some solitary pair of oars, we felt as though we had reached the beginnings of civilization, or the ends of it. This was specially true of Loch Laxford--the last of such inland shelters lying south of Cape Wrath--Cape Wrath, the lightning of whose lanterns and the boom of whose great foghorns send out warnings to those on "seas full of wonder and peril," which Swinburne's verse commemorates.