“‘Oh, it’s for yourself, my man, to drink our health with,’ answered the English lord, or whatever he was, rudely. Then Murdoch looked at him and his quietly, an’ he said, ‘God has your health an’ my health in the hollow of His hands. But I wish you well. Only, I am not being your man, any more than I am for calling _you_, _my_ man; an’ I will ask you to take back this money to drink with; nor have I any need for money, but only for that which is free to all, but that only God can give,’ And with that the foreign people went away, and laughed less. But when the second yacht came, though it was a yawl and owned by a Glasgow man who had folk in the west, Murdoch would not come down to the shore, but lay under the shadow of a rock amid his sheep, and kept his eyes upon the sun that was moving west out of the south. “Well, all through the fine months Murdoch stayed on Bac-Mòr, and thereafter through the early winter. The last time I saw him was at the New Year. On Hogmanay night my father was drinking hard, and nothing would serve him but he must borrow Alec Macarthur’s boat, and that he and our mother and myself, and Ian Finlay and his wife, my sister, should go out before the quiet south wind that was blowing, and see Murdoch where he lay sleeping or sat dreaming in his lonely bothy. And, truth, we went. It was a white sailing that I remember. The moon-shinings ran in and out of the wavelets like herrings through salmon nets. The fire-flauchts, too, went speeding about. I was but a laddie then, an’ I noted it all; an’ the sheet-lightning that played behind the cloudy lift in the nor’-west. “But when we got to Bac-Mòr there was no sign of Murdoch at the bothy: no, not though we called high and low. Then my father and Ian Finlay went to look, and we stayed by the peats. When they came back, an hour later, I saw that my father was no more in drink. He had the same look in his eyes as Ronald McLean had that day last winter when they told him his bit girlie had been caught by the small-pox in Glasgow. “I could not hear, or I could not make out, what was said; but I know that we all got into the boat again, all except my father. And he stayed. And next day Ian Finlay and Alec Macarthur went out to Bac-Mòr, and brought him back. “And from him and from Ian I knew all there was to be known. It was a hard New Year for all, and since that day, till a night of which I will tell you, my father brooded and drank, drank and brooded, and my mother wept through the winter gloamings and spent the nights starin’ into the peats, wi’ her knittin’ lyin’ on her lap.