"You are an old woman to be working like this," I ventured.

She looked at me with that strange, unblinking gaze, and she
thought and spoke with the slow deliberateness that characterized

everything about her, as if well aware of an eternity that was hers
and in which there was no need for haste. Again I was impressed by

the enormous certitude of her. In this eternity that seemed so
indubitably hers, there was time and to spare for safe-footing and

stable equilibrium - for certitude, in short. No more in her
spiritual life than in carrying the hundredweights of grain was

there a possibility of a misstep or an overbalancing. The feeling
produced in me was uncanny. Here was a human soul that, save for

the most glimmering of contacts, was beyond the humanness of me.
And the more I learned of Margaret Henan in the weeks that followed

the more mysteriouslyremote she became. She was as alien as a
far-journeyer from some other star, and no hint could she nor all

the countryside give me of what forms of living, what heats of
feeling, or rules of philosophic contemplation actuated her in all

that she had been and was.
"I wull be suvunty-two come Guid Friday a fortnight," she said in

reply to my question.
"But you are an old woman to be doing this man's work, and a strong

man's work at that," I insisted.
Again she seemed to immerse herself in that atmosphere of

contemplative eternity, and so strangely did it affect me that I
should not have been surprised to have awaked a century or so later

and found her just beginning to enunciate her reply -
"The work hoz tull be done, an' I am beholden tull no one."

"But have you no children, no family, relations?"
"Oh, aye, a-plenty o' them, but they no see fut tull be helpun'

me."
She drew out her pipe for a moment, then added, with a nod of her

head toward the house, "I luv' wuth meself."
I glanced at the house, straw-thatched and commodious, at the large

stable, and at the large array of fields I knew must belong with
the place.

"It is a big bit of land for you to farm by yourself."
"Oh, aye, a bug but, suvunty acres. Ut kept me old mon buzzy,

along wuth a son an' a hired mon, tull say naught o' extra honds un
the harvest an' a maid-servant un the house."

She clambered into the cart, gathered the reins in her hands, and
quizzed me with her keen, shrewd eyes.

"Belike ye hail from over the watter - Ameruky, I'm meanun'?"
"Yes, I'm a Yankee," I answered.

"Ye wull no be findun' mony Island McGill folk stoppun' un
Ameruky?"

"No; I don't remember ever meeting one, in the States."
She nodded her head.

"They are home-luvun' bodies, though I wull no be sayin' they are
no fair-travelled. Yet they come home ot the last, them oz are no

lost ot sea or kult by fevers an' such-like un foreign parts."
"Then your sons will have gone to sea and come home again?" I

queried.
"Oh, aye, all savun' Samuel oz was drownded."

At the mention of Samuel I could have sworn to a strange light in
her eyes, and it seemed to me, as by some telepathic flash, that I

divined in her a tremendous wistfulness, an immense yearning. It
seemed to me that here was the key to her inscrutableness, the clue

that if followed properly would make all her strangeness plain. It
came to me that here was a contact and that for the moment I was

glimpsing into the soul of her. The question was tickling on my
tongue, but she forestalled me.

She TCHK'D to the horse, and with a "Guid day tull you, sir," drove
off.

A simple, homely people are the folk of Island McGill, and I doubt
if a more sober, thrifty, and industrious folk is to be found in

all the world. Meeting them abroad - and to meet them abroad one
must meet them on the sea, for a hybrid sea-faring and farmer breed

are they - one would never take them to be Irish. Irish they claim
to be, speaking of the North of Ireland with pride and sneering at

their Scottish brothers; yet Scotch they undoubtedly are,
transplanted Scotch of long ago, it is true, but none the less

Scotch, with a thousand traits, to say nothing of their tricks of
speech and woolly utterance, which nothing less than their Scotch

clannishness could have preserved to this late day.
A narrow loch, scarcely half a mile wide, separates Island McGill

from the mainland of Ireland; and, once across this loch, one finds
himself in an entirely different country. The Scotch impression is

strong, and the people, to commence with, are Presbyterians. When
it is considered that there is no public-house in all the island

and that seven thousand souls dwell therein, some idea may be
gained of the temperateness of the community. Wedded to old ways,

public opinion and the ministers are powerful influences, while
fathers and mothers are revered and obeyed as in few other places

in this modern world. Courting lasts never later than ten at
night, and no girl walks out with her young man without her

parents' knowledge and consent.
The young men go down to the sea and sow their wild oats in the

wicked ports, returning periodically, between voyages, to live the
old intensivemorality, to court till ten o'clock, to sit under the

minister each Sunday, and to listen at home to the same stern
precepts that the elders preached to them from the time they were

laddies. Much they learned of women in the ends of the earth,
these seafaring sons, yet a canny wisdom was theirs and they never

brought wives home with them. The one solitaryexception to this
had been the schoolmaster, who had been guilty of bringing a wife

from half a mile the other side of the loch. For this he had never
been forgiven, and he rested under a cloud for the remainder of his

days. At his death the wife went back across the loch to her own
people, and the blot on the escutcheon of Island McGill was erased.

In the end the sailor-men married girls of their own homeland and
settled down to become exemplars of all the virtues for which the

island was noted.
Island McGill was without a history. She boasted none of the

events that go to make history. There had never been any wearing
of the green, any Fenian conspiracies, any land disturbances.

There had been but one eviction, and that purelytechnical - a test
case, and on advice of the tenant's lawyer. So Island McGill was

without annals. History had passed her by. She paid her taxes,
acknowledged her crowned rulers, and left the world alone; all she

asked in return was that the world should leave her alone. The
world was composed of two parts - Island McGill and the rest of it.

And whatever was not Island McGill was outlandish and barbarian;
and well she knew, for did not her seafaring sons bring home report

of that world and its ungodly ways?
It was from the skipper of a Glasgow tramp, as passenger from

Colombo to Rangoon, that I had first learned of the existence of
Island McGill; and it was from him that I had carried the letter

that gave me entrance to the house of Mrs. Ross, widow of a master
mariner, with a daughter living with her and with two sons, master

mariners themselves and out upon the sea. Mrs. Ross did not take
in boarders, and it was Captain Ross's letter alone that had

enabled me to get from her bed and board. In the evening, after my
encounter with Margaret Henan, I questioned Mrs. Ross, and I knew

on the instant that I had in truth stumbled upon mystery.
Like all Island McGill folk, as I was soon to discover, Mrs. Ross

was at first averse to discussing Margaret Henan at all. Yet it
was from her I learned that evening that Margaret Henan had once

been one of the island belles. Herself the daughter of a well-to-
do farmer, she had married Thomas Henan, equally well-to-do.

Beyond the usual housewife's tasks she had never been accustomed to
work. Unlike many of the island women, she had never lent a hand

in the fields.
"But what of her children?" I asked.