There was nothing to keep them much longer at Shetland. Yet the moors were all purple with heather. Allan suggested gathering a garland to hang at the Snowbird’s main truck, where the crow’s-nest had been through all the Arctic winter.

“So romantic a proposal,” said Rory, “deserves seconding, though ’deed and in troth, when you spoke, Allan, of gathering heather, I fancied it would be a broom you’d be after making. There is a spice of poetry in you after all.”

Two days after this, on a lovely balmy August afternoon, with just wind enough to fill the sails, the Snowbird, looking as white in canvas as her namesake, looking as clean and as taut and as trim as though she had never left the Scottish shores, rounded the point of Ardnamurchan, and stood in towards Loch Sunart. Hardly had they opened out the broad blue lake when McBain exclaimed, with joyous excitement in his every tone, —

“Boys, come here, quick!”

The boys came bounding.

“Look yonder, what is that?” As she spoke he pointed towards a tidy little cutter yacht that came rushing towards them over the water as if she couldn’t come quickly enough.

“The Flower of Arrandoon!” every one said in a breath. And so it was. Too impatient to remain any longer at Oban, our heroes’ friends had set sail to meet them. In fifteen minutes more they were all together on board the Snowbird.

I would much rather leave it to the reader’s imagination than tell of the joyous greetings that followed, of the pleasant passage up the canal and through the lake, till once more anchored in sight of the dear old castle, surrounded with its hills of glorious purple heather; of the return to Arrandoon, and the wildness of the dogs, and the ecstasies of poor old Janet, for as the chain rattles over the bows and the anchor drops in the waters of the lake —the Cruise of the “Snowbird” ends.

It remains only for me, the author, to briefly breathe that little word, which never yet was spoken without some degree of tender sorrow, and say Adieu.