And here, as we draw away from Canna, is the vast panorama of the sea-world around us once more—the mighty mountain range of Skye shining faintly in the northern skies; Haleval and Haskeval still of a gloomy purple in the east; and away beyond these leagues of rushing Atlantic the clear blue line of North Uist. Whither are we bound, then, you small captain with the pale face and the big, soft, tender black eyes? Do you fear a shower of spray that you have strapped that tightly-fitting ulster round the graceful small figure? And are you quite sure that you know whether the wind is on the port or starboard beam? "Look! look! look!" she calls, and our F.R.S., who has been busy over the charts, jumps to his feet. Just at the bow of the vessel we see the great shining black thing disappear. What if there had been a collision? "You cannot call _that_ a porpoise, any way," says she. "Why, it must have been eighty feet long!" "Yes, yacht measurement," says he. "But it had a back fin, which is suspicious, and it did not blow. Now," he adds—for we have been looking all round for the re-appearance of the huge stranger—"if you want to see real whales at work, just look over there, close under Rum. I should say there was a whole shoal of them in the Sound." And there, sure enough, we see from time to time the white spoutings—rising high into the air in the form of the letter V, and slowly falling again. They are too far away for us to hear the sound of their blowing, nor can we catch any glimpse, through the best of our glasses, of their appearance at the surface. Moreover, the solitary stranger that nearly ran against our bows makes no reappearance; he has had enough of the wonders of the upper world for a time. It is a fine sailing morning, and we pay but little attention to the fact that the wind, as usual, soon gets to be dead ahead. So long as the breeze blows, and the sun shines, and the white spray flies from the bows of the _White Dove_, what care we which harbour is to shelter us for the night? And if we cannot get into any harbour, what then? We carry our own kingdom with us; and we are far from being dependent on the one old hen. But in the midst of much laughing at one of the Laird’s good ones—the inexhaustible Homesh was again to the fore—a head appears at the top of the companion-way; and there is a respectful silence. Unseemly mirth dies away before the awful dignity of this person. "Angus," she says, with a serious remonstrance on her face, "do you believe what scientific people tell you?" Angus Sutherland starts, and looks up; he has been deep in a chart of Loch Bracadaile. "Don’t they say that water finds its own level? Now do you call this water finding its own level?"—and as she propounds this conundrum, she clings on tightly to the side of the companion, for, in truth, the _White Dove_ is curveting a good deal among those great masses of waves.