When Eynhallow was still a vanishing island, it became known in Rousay that if any man, seeing the isle, should hold steel in his hand and, taking boat, go out through the tides, never looking at aught but the island, nor ever letting go the steel till he leaped on to its virgin shore, that man should break the spell and win the isle from the sea-folk for his own people. After many failures—and who can tell how many a brave heart went down the tide to the sea-trows in that perilous venture?—there came at last the hour and the man; the vanishing isle was won from the waters, and left standing “in the middle of the tide.” If there be yet any man brave enough to try the adventure of the vanishing island, Heather-Bleather awaits his coming. I have never met any person who would confess to having seen that mysterious isle, but many of the dwellers by the roosts have spoken to those who saw it rise green out of the waters. This island is the home of the Fin-men or Sea-men (not to be too rashly identified with the sea-trows), a race of beings who play a prominent part in Orcadian folk-lore. In Rousay they tell of a maiden mysteriously rapt from the hillside over the sea, and sought in vain by her kindred. Long years after, “when grief was calm and hope was dead,” the lost girl’s father and brothers were at sea in their fishing-boat, when there rolled down upon them one of those dense banks of sea-fog so common in the North in summer. The fishermen knew not where they were, but sailed on until their boat grounded on an island which at first they took to be Eynhallow. They soon found, however, that they were on an island they had never seen before, and on going up to a “white house” they found in the “guid-wife” who admitted them their long lost daughter and sister. She welcomed them, and in a little time her husband and his brother came in from the sea in “wisps” (the local name for great rolls of heather “simmons,” or ropes, used in thatching houses). Others say that they came in the guise of seals, and cast off their skins. Be that as it may, they treated their human connections well and hospitably. When the time came for the men to leave for home, the woman refused to accompany them, but she gave her father a knife, and told him that so long as he kept it he could come to the isle of the waters whenever he pleased. Just as the boat put to sea the knife slipped from the old man’s hand into the water; in a moment the fog swallowed the island, and no man has set foot on it since.