THE ISLAND OF COLONSAY 25 



Scotland where to spend my autumn holiday, and 

 heard that my western Utopia was to be let for 

 August and September. I visited Sir John M'Neill 

 at home in his apartments at St. James' Palace, and 

 found him more than willing to accept me as a tenant 

 at very moderate rent. In his downright way he 

 ridiculed the idea that his island home was at all 

 out of the way or difficult of access, and indeed all 

 my own later experience went to prove that the 

 danger of being cut off from communication with the 

 mainland was greatly exaggerated. During the six 

 or seven visits I afterwards paid there, many of them 

 prolonged for two or three months, I do not recall more 

 than two or three occasions when the steamer was 

 unable to call and disembark mails and passengers. 



At his suggestion we paid a picnic visit to his 

 house at Killoran to spy out the land. The weather 

 was lovely, and one of his nephews was there to do 

 the honours. It seemed enchanted ground. The gulls 

 and cormorants were building on the cliffs, where also 

 were then to be found a few nests of the chough, a 

 bird now rare in the British Isles. Plovers and oyster- 

 catchers were busy on the links, from which the eye 

 searched the broad Atlantic to catch a sight of the 

 distant lighthouse of Dubheartach, the only inhabited 

 land between us and America. It was early for loch 

 fishing, but we sampled the trout in West Loch Fada, 

 and visited that mountain gem, Loch Sgoltaire, which 

 is situated so exactly upon the watershed that the 

 overflow sometimes discharges itself from both ends, 

 one stream flowing into Killoran bay and the Sound 

 of Mull, the other finding its way into Loch Fada and 

 thence into the Atlantic. We could not of course 



