If neither of these delights were within reach--if perhaps two were sleeping and the third could find no means to follow their example--I would see him sit and listen and look about him in a progression of uneasiness, starting, his face blenching, his hands clutched, a man strung like a bow.

The nature of these fears I had never an occasion to find out, but the sight of them was catching, and the nature of the place that we were in favourable to alarms.

I can find no word for it in the English, but Andie had an expression for it in the Scots from which he never varied.
"Ay," he would say, "_it's an unco place, the Bass_." It is so I always think of it.

It was an unco place by night, unco by day; and these were unco sounds, of the calling of the solans, and the plash of the sea and the rock echoes, that hung continually in our ears.

It was chiefly so in moderate weather.