indie’s Reviews > The Merry Men > Status Update

"The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me to the heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a desolate melancholy [...] the thought of its owner appeared before me like the presence of an actual man. [...] the whole human fact of him, as a creature like myself, with hair and blood and seeing eyes, haunted me in that sunny, solitary place, not like a spectre, but like some friend whom I had basely injured."

"Here was a grave; and I had to ask myself, with a chill, what manner of man lay there in his last sleep, awaiting the signal of the Lord in that solitary, sea-beat resting-place? [...] Shipwrecked, at least, he must have been; perhaps, like the old Armada mariners, from some far and rich land over-sea; or perhaps one of my own race, perishing within eyesight of the smoke of home."

"'Aweel, aweel,” he said, “it may be sae; I may be wrang; but I find nae word o’ mermen in the Scriptures.'

'And you will find nae word of Aros Roost, maybe,” objected Rorie, and his argument appeared to carry weight.'"

"The bare stone walls and the bare wooden floor, the three patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole adornment—poor man’s patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous additions..."

"But an uncle of mine [...] had married a young wife in the islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and when she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had remained in his possession. [...] he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued; he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh adventure upon life [...] biting his nails at destiny."

"I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from an unmixed lowland stock."