[CHAPTER XXVI]
A BOAT IN SIGHT AT SULISCANNA
There was one spot on Suliscanna, the island to which she had been brought, that Kate especially loved. It was where the great Lianacraig precipice, a thousand feet of hard rock, curiously streaked with the green of serpentine and the white of the breeding and roosting ocean birds, sank sheer into the foam-fringed emerald wash of the sea.
At the eastward end of the vast wall there began a beach of pure white sand, curving round in a clean sickle-sweep for a mile and a half to the mural face of the cliffs of Aoinaig, which served for its northern gateway.
To this wide strand, with its frowning guardian watch-towers of tall cliff on either side, Kate came every day, week in and week out, during the first months of her isolation. She took her way thither from the low, thatched hut of Mistress Alister McAlister, in which she dwelt in a cleanliness and comfort more reminiscent of Carrick than characteristic of the neighboring houses of Suliscanna. The cattle did not occupy the first apartment in the house of Mistress McAlister. The floor did not, as was commonly the case, rise gradually towards the roof upon a rich deposit of "peat-coom" and general débris, solidified by the spent water of the household and the trampling of many feet.
The house in which Kate dwelt on Suliscanna was paved with flags of slate, which Alister and his wife had put in position, to the great scandal of the entire island—including the minister of the Small Isles himself, who preached most powerfully against the practice as pampering to poor human vanity, and causing foolish people to grasp at worldly state and pomp, and so neglect the glories of another and a better world.
But Mistress McAlister had her answer ready to that.
"I am of opinion," she retorted, when the sermon was reported to her, "that Alister and me will no be left strange and friendless up yonder on the streets of gold, just because we happen to prefer clean stanes to dirty peat and fish-banes here below."
And for this pointed rejoinder Mistress McAlister was debarred the table of communion.