The wind fell as we crossed the Sound. There was only one oar in the boat, and we lay idly adrift. The tide was still on the ebb, and so we made way for Soa; though, well before the island could be reached, the tide would turn, and the sea-wind would stir, and we be up the Sound and at Balliemore again almost as quick as the laying of a net. As we--and by “us” I am meaning Phadric Macrae and Ivor McLean, fishermen of Iona, and myself beside Ivor at the helm--as we slid slowly past the ragged islet known as Eilean-na-h’ Aon-Chaorach, torn and rent by the tides and surges of a thousand years, I saw a school of seals basking in the sun. One by one slithered into the water, and I could note the dark forms, like moving patches of sea-weed, drifting in the green underglooms. Then, after a time, we bore down upon Sgeir-na-Oir, a barren rock. Three great cormorants stood watching us. Their necks shone in the sunlight like snakes mailed in blue and green. On the upper ledges were eight or ten northern-divers. They did not seem to see us, though I knew that their fierce light-blue eyes noted every motion we made. The small sea-ducks bobbed up and down, first one flirt of a little black-feathered rump, then another, then a third, till a score or so were under water, and half-a-hundred more were ready at a moment’s notice to follow suit. A skua hopped among the sputtering weed, and screamed disconsolately at intervals. Among the myriad colonies of close-set mussels, which gave a blue bloom like that of the sloe to the weed-covered boulders, a few kittiwakes and dotterels flitted to and fro. High overhead, white against the blue as a cloudlet, a gannet hung motionless, seemingly frozen to the sky. Below the lapse of the boat the water was pale green. I could see the liath and saith fanning their fins in slow flight, and sometimes a little scurrying cloud of tiny flukies and inch-long codling. For two or three fathoms beyond the boat the waters were blue. If blueness can be alive and have its own life and movement, it must be happy on these western seas, where it dreams into shadowy Lethes of amethyst and deep, dark oblivions of violet. Suddenly a streak of silver ran for a moment along the sea to starboard. It was like an arrow of moonlight shot along the surface of the blue and gold. Almost immediately afterward, a stertorous sigh was audible. A black knife cut the flow of the water: the shoulder of a pollack. “The mackerel are coming in from the sea,” said Macrae. He leaned forward, wet the palm of his hand, and held it seaward. “Ay, the tide has turned----” _“Ohrone--achree--an--Srùth-màra!_ _Ohrone--achree--an--Lionadh!”_ he droned monotonously, over and over, with few variations. “An’ it’s Oh an’ Oh for the tides o’ the sea, An’ it’s Oh for the flowing tide,” I sang at last in mockery. “Come, Phadric,” I cried, “you are as bad as Peter McAlpin’s lassie, Fiona, with the pipes!”