However, we took the procurator's word for the inn at Ulva, and started out again with our knapsacks, which seemed but heavier on our backs after several days' rest. All morning we tramped dreary miles of moor and hill, with the wind in our faces, and by lochs with endless curves, around which we had to go, though we saw our journey's end just before us. While we followed the northern shore of Loch-Na-Keal, high Ben-More, with its head among the clouds, was behind us. In front was the Atlantic, with heavy showers passing over it, and now blotting out far Staffa and the long ridge of the Ross of Mull, an encircling shadow between the ocean and the headland of Gribun; and now sweeping across the loch and the near green island of Inch-Kenneth.
A large house, with wide lawn and green fields and well-clipped hedges, just at the head of Loch-Na-Keal, and one or two small new cottages shut in with flaming banks of fuchsias, showed what Mull might be if in the island men were held in as high account as rabbits and grouse. We saw the many white tails of the rabbits in among the ferns, and though they live only to be shot, on the whole we thought them better off than the solemn, silent men and women who trudged by us towards Salen, where it was market-day, for it is their fate to live only to starve and suffer. The one man who spoke to us during that long morning was a shepherd, with a soft gentle voice and foreign Scotch, whose sheep we frightened up the hill-side.
ULVA
lay so close to the shores of Mull as scarce to seem a separate island. But the waters of the narrow Sound were rough. The postman, who had just been ferried over, held the boat as we stepped into it from the slippery stones of the landing. As he waited, he said not a word. They keep silence, these people, under the yoke they have borne for generations. The ferryman was away, and the boy who had come in his place had hard work to row against wind and waves, and harder work to talk English. "I beg pardon," was his answer to every question we asked.
The little white inn was just opposite the landing, and we went to it at once, for it was late and we were hungry. We asked the landlady if she could give us some meat.
"Of course," she said—and her English was fairly good—she could give us tea and eggs.
"No, but meat," we repeated.
"Yes, of course," she said again; "tea and eggs."
And we kept on asking for meat, and she kept on promising us tea and eggs, and I know not how the discussion had ended, if on a sudden it had not occurred to us that for her the word had none other but its Scriptural meaning.
While she prepared lunch we sat on low rocks by the boats drawn up high and dry on the stony beach. At the southern end of the island was Ulva House, white through an opening in a pleasant wood, and surrounded by broad green pastures. Just in front of us, close to the inn, a handful of bare black cottages rose from the mud in among rocks and bowlders. No paths led to the doors; nothing green grew about the walls. Women with pinched, care-worn faces came and went, busy with household work, and they were silent as the people we had met on the road. Beyond was barrenness; not another tree, not another bit of pasture-land was in sight. And yet, before the people were brought unto desolation, almost all the island was green as the meadows about the laird's house; and so it could be again if men were but allowed to cultivate the ground. Where weeds and rushes and ferns now cover the hills and the level places were once fields of grain and grass. To-day only the laird's crops are still sowed and reaped. Once there could be heard the many voices of men and women and children at work or at play, where now the only sounds are the roaring of the waters and the crack of the rifle.[F] Of all the many townships that were scattered from one end of the island to the other, there remains but this miserable group of cottages. The people have been driven from the land they loved, and sent hither and thither, some across the narrow Sound, others far across the broad Atlantic.