Chapter 16

LEGENDS AND LITERARY NOTABILIA.

Gairloch folk-lore: Prince Olaf and his bride--A laird who had seen a fairy--Tales from Loch Broom: The dance of death--The Kildonan midwife--The magic herring--Taisch--Antiquities of Dunvegan--Miscellaneous terrors--St. Kilda--Lady Grange--Pierless Tiree--Lochbuie in Mull--Inveraray Castle--The sacred isle--Appin--Macdonald's gratitude--Notes on the Trossachs--Lochfyneside: Macivors, Macvicars, and Macallisters--Red Hector--Macphail of Colonsay--Tales from Speyside: Tom Eunan!--Shaws and Grants--The wishing well--Ossian and Macpherson--At the foot o' Bennachie--Harlaw--Lochaber reivers--Reay and Twickenham--Rob Donn--Rev. Mr. Mill of Dunrossness.

GAIRLOCH FOLK-LORE.

I do not think anyone interested in local history and antiquities could find a greater treat than that furnished by Mr. Dixon's _Account of the Parish of Gairloch_. That romantic and lovely district is fortunate in having found a historian of unlimited enthusiasm and untiring industry. There is not a single dry page in his long and detailed narrative. Many of the legends he tells are known to me from other sources, but I am certain that no Scotch compiler (Mr. Dixon, let me say, is English) has written of them with such enjoyable sympathy and poetical ardour. I have been assured by local authorities that the facts adduced by Mr. Dixon are invariably reliable. That I can well believe; but what is still more rare, Mr. Dixon's facts are everywhere made to gleam and glitter in the radiance of romance. Let me narrate, in concentrated form, one of the legends which this clever writer has alluded to in more than one of his chapters.

PRINCE OLAF AND HIS BRIDE.

In the ninth century of the Christian era, one of the islands that in such picturesque fashion dot the surface of Loch Maree, was honoured by being the abode of a pious hermit, despatched thither from the sacred isle of Iona. His presence there, implying as it did austerity, perpetual worship of Heaven, and the reading of devout treatises, inspired veneration in the minds of the obstreperous tribes around. They felt themselves better from having such a good man near them. Wherever in these old times of war and gore, a saintly pioneer established himself, the kingdom of chaos and night was pushed back for miles around his cell.

The Picts of the ninth century revered this man, and his fame was known also to the predatory seamen who came buccaneering among the islands of the West. A Viking of royal blood, Prince Olaf, in the intervals of his sea-roving, hied sometimes to the hermit's retreat, for instruction and spiritual blessing. The young man, as tradition alleges, was not beyond the need of guidance, for his temper was of the most fiery violence, and, at the slightest provocation, his hand was on the hilt of his sword. No doubt the saint of Isle Maree managed to moderate the Prince's vehemence, and draw him somewhat away from wrath which (as Homer puts it), waxeth like smoke in the breasts of warriors, and is far sweeter to them than trickling honey.

By and by, this youth fell in love, and in characteristic fashion he loved with a whole-souled and overwhelming passion. The hot-tempered Viking became a new man, and he thus communed with himself: "How can I ask this maid to share my life on the stormy sea? She is too tender and gentle to go under the dark clouds in a war-galley with me and my rude mates, when we sail to meet the enemy. Nor, were she my wife, could I leave her behind and unprotected. Marry her I must, but I can neither take her with me thereafter, nor defend her in my absence. Go to, I'll e'en visit the monk of Isle Maree and get counsel from _him_."

It is pleasant to note that the holy father found a way out of the difficulty. "Marry her, my son," said he, "and build a tower of strength as her abode on this isle of mine. When you are away, she will be near me. Old man as I am, the natives respect me for my devotion and my hoary hairs." The prince's scruples, so honourable to his love, were overcome. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and rejoicing. The green pathways of the isle were thronged with feasters; tents were erected beside the thickets of oak and holly, and the Loch had little rest from the plashing of oars. The hermit blessed the couple and blessed the castle too in which the twain were for a time to reside.

Prince Olaf and his lady were perfectly happy, and the golden hours of their wedlock sped merrily by. But the hours that were short to them, were long and dreary to the Norse rovers, lying inactive in the ships anchored hard by in the waters of Loch Ewe. Murmurs, growing at length in volume, were muttered by the men as they reflected, day by day, on the soft uxoriousness of their leader. They wished to be at sea on an expedition that had been planned aforetime ere the marriage had taken place. These murmurs reached the prince's ears, and, with many tears, he tore himself away from the bridal tower to take his place at the head of the squadron. It was a bitter severance, but tempered by the expectation of a speedy reunion. The prince took with him two pennons, a black and a white. "If I am successful in my expedition," he said, "I will display the white pennon on my galley; if misfortune befalls me (which God avert) the black will be flying on the prow. Do you come to meet my returning fleet and let a similar indication be visible on your barge to tell of your safety or your misfortune. A lover feels his excitement growing, the nearer he comes to his home: let us abridge, by such a device, the length of our anxiety."

Love did not make Olaf a worse fighter: rather, indeed, it improved his prowess. The thought of the fair young wife in the lonely tower, protected mainly by the sanctity of an old hermit, nerved his arm, and he speedily got through the expedition with great applause. He swept everything before him, and turned homeward in the expectation of a cordial and meet welcome. During his absence, the lady had been fretting. Finally, as the days passed, she became downright angry. "He is neglecting me," she cried; "he goes away from my arms to the society of rough seamen. I am a mere bauble, a plaything for his leisure. He is tired of me, and perhaps on some distant coast he is dallying with a newer sweetheart. But I will try his heart. When I hear of his homecoming, I will go forth on my barge and have the black flag of desolation flying from the prow. In this way I may obtain some hint of his real feelings."

Olaf came homeward in great glee, and on entering Loch Ewe from the outer sea, the white pennon of success flapped gaily in the wind. The princess, on the other hand, let prepare her boat, and, clothed in the weeds of death, lay down on the deck, while simulated sobs of woe and lamentation were raised by all her attendants. Slowly the boat, with its ill-omened signal, moved to meet the conquering hero. Olaf, the impetuous, was chilled to the heart, when he saw what he thought the sure indication of his lady's misfortune. What a sight met his eyes when he leapt on board! The princess stretched out in apparent death, and robed in the garments of the grave! He could not endure the torment and disillusion. He drove a dirk into his bosom with such passionate might that he fell down, bereft of life, mighty and mightily fallen, on the deck beside her.

She had not expected such a tragic conclusion to her blamable artifice. Remorse, of course, got hold of her, and drawing the gory weapon from her dead lord's breast, she plunged it into her own. Too late was she convinced of his true love for her: she had only one duty, and that was to die with him. It is said in the legend that her life was not extinct when the barge, with its weird freight, returned to the hermit's isle. The old man, holding in his quaking hand the cross before her dying eyes, strove to comfort her somewhat as her blood ebbed quickly away.

"The bodies of the unhappy pair," says Mr. Dixon, "were buried within the inclosure on the island, beneath the shade of the sacred hollies; they were laid with their feet towards each other, and smooth stones with outlines of mediaeval crosses were placed over the graves, and there they remain to this day. A few stones still indicate the site of the hermit's cell, and a considerable mound marks where the tower stood."

The last time I stood beside the little pier on Loch Maree, I noticed many indications of the advent of southern tourists. Empty bottles were floating on the waves, and the tiny steamer that plies on the loch was getting ready for the summer traffic. Visitors from the Lowlands do not suspect that such tales as I have narrated still live on the lips of the Gairloch natives, and help to pass the hours at many an evening reunion. How the centuries meet in such nooks of Ross! Steamers on Loch Maree, and Olaf's cross still standing on the hermit's isle! The driver of the mail-coach from Achnasheen to Gairloch will discuss creeds and schisms with you, and tell you he does not believe in modern religious developments at all; anon, as the coach passes the Gairloch Church, he will point with extended whip to a grassy hollow on the left, and say: "That is where the Free Church used to have its open-air Communion Service: the place is called _Leabaidh na Ba Bhaine_, because Fingal scooped it out as a bed where his white cow might calve." "But did Fingal lodge in this neighbourhood?" you ask. "Oh yes, he did whatever," the driver will reply, "and the best proof of it is, that if you go to the north end of Loch Maree, you will see the _sweetheart's stepping-stones_, placed there by Fingal to keep his feet dry when he went that way to court Malvina."

A LAIRD WHO HAD SEEN A FAIRY.

Bailie Nicol Jarvie, whom we all know so well, confessed that when he heard the wild stories of the North, he felt his blood tingle and his pulses leap. This fact, which as a sober man of business he felt bound to apologize for, was probably due to heredity, his mother having been a Macgregor. The Bailie lived at a time when rumours of witchcraft and fairydom were more common than now, and when there was less dissemination of Scripture truth. It is a saying in some parts of the North that the profuse spread of the Shorter Catechism has been the means of driving witches and fairies out of their old haunts. For my own part, I know of nothing more likely to make them decamp.[28]

I was lucky enough to meet a gentleman who declared, not with an oath, but with a _pretty strong_ asseveration, that he had once seen a fairy. It was in a railway train that I knit conversation with him. He was a kilted country squire, tall, thin, and soulful: on his head was a glengarry with a pair of flying ribbons. He spoke in rapt sentences, as if he were looking on a vision. This is the substance of his remarks:--

One autumn morning, when the world lay fair Under the radiant blue, I musing lay By a green knoll, beside a rippling bay, When, suddenly, gliding through the silent air, A green-clad apparition, wrinkled, spare, Angry, and grieving, passed along the way Before me for a moment's space. The fay Was old and did not see me lying there. I grieved to see her sob in fretful mood, And often since I marvel in my mind What grievous heart-pang drove her from the wood To ease her heart away from her own kind. Strange, that these tiny, soulless beings should, Like us, be grieved and be with passion blind!

These are the words of a man who speaks with conviction. I ought to mention that, ecclesiastically (and I hope in other ways, too,) he was a Moderate. Two things annoyed him greatly: (1) that the fairy did not deign to look at him; (2) that nobody but his little grand-daughter of eight would believe he had seen a fairy at all. "Why," he said, "I could draw that fairy now, if I had pencil and paper. I see her as plain as I see you. _Her little bosom was heaving, and she wore a necklace of twisted corn-stalks. I am sorry I did not offer her some refreshment._"

[28] A very similar account is given, of the dearth of the little folk in England, by the poet Chaucer; only, that eminent writer declares that the phenomenon is due to the zeal and prayers of the monks and begging-friars, who paced about the country muttering blessings and exorcistic paragraphs.

TALES FROM LOCH BROOM.

The enquirer will find a specially abundant crop of old stories if he stays long on Loch Broom side. The bard of Ullapool, Mr. Roderick Mackenzie, has made an excellent collection of romantic incidents associated with the neighbourhood, and has told them in a very quaint and effective fashion. From his collection I now cite a specimen or two. I by no means recommend them as reading for the small hours of the morning.

THE DANCE OF DEATH.

Three young fellows belonging to Strathmore, in the parish of Loch Broom, were returning from the Low Country, where they had been living for some time. It was long before the days of Watt and Macadam; roads were not good, progress was slow, and rain was frequent. When they, in the final lap of their journey, arrived at the green hillside of Lochdrom, the weather was extremely inclement. Seeing a commodious shieling on the braeface, the young men entered, and one of them, with the object of driving dull care away, struck up a lightsome tune on his pipes. His two comrades at once began to fling their legs about and caper merrily. Soon, having succeeded in dancing themselves dry, they all agreed that female partners would be a great acquisition. The wish was at once gratified. Three women mysteriously glided into the shieling, and the dancing began in earnest. One of the women stood close by the piper, while the other two skipped about, with their partners, all round the building. Outside it thundered and lightened in terrific fashion. Tired and sweating, the two couples were at length fain to stop, and they sat down to rest on seats of turf and heather. The piper stopped too: he felt some malign influence coming over him; he was certain some devilish deed was a-doing. Stealing a glance at his two friends, he perceived that they were both stark dead, and that the two infernal huzzies were smiling a hideous smile of triumph. Action, he felt, was immediately necessary: he flung the still groaning bagpipes full in the face of the witch near him, stunned her thus for an instant, and with one wild leap cleared the threshold. And now began a hot race and hot pursuit. Like another Tam o' Shanter, but without the mare, the piper sped over the moor and through the rain, plying a foot as good as wings. Not till they came in sight of the clachan of Fasagrianach, did the witches relinquish the chase. The exhausted piper had a sad tale to tell to the mothers of his two hapless friends. Next day a company of mourners went to the scene of the infernal dance, and, amid much mourning, they sang a weird wail with the sad refrain, _Airidh mo Dhubhaich_, which, being interpreted, means "Shieling of my Sorrow."

Let me give another tale, but of less sombre issue, culled from the folk-lore of the same locality.

THE KILDONAN MIDWIFE.

A woman living at Kildonan, on the north shore of Little Loch Broom, and exercising the useful profession of howdie, or midwife, had been summoned to attend a case at Keppoch. She did not arrive at her destination, although she left home after telling her neighbours where she was going. It was on Christmas eve that Fair Sarah, as she was called, left Kildonan, and for the space of an entire year, not a word, good or bad, was heard of her. Search parties were organized, but all to no purpose. Exactly twelve months after her disappearance--the next Christmas eve, namely--back came the errant midwife to her home, not a hair the worse for her long absence. She was immensely astonished to find she had been so long away, her own impression being that only an hour or two had elapsed. It was evident to all the natives of Kildonan that Fair Sarah had been among the fairies, in whose company, as every one knows, months and years slip past as quickly as hours and days. Sarah was asked to speak out and tell her experiences. "It seems to me," said the flustered howdie, "that it was but last night that I left for Keppoch. Just as I passed the White Knoll, between Strathmore and Strathbeg, I came upon a company of little folk, who would have me with them, right reason or none. I accepted their hospitality, and what drinking, skipping, revelry, and glee my eyes beheld! At last I grew sick of their cantrips and capers. Remembering I was a Christian and a communicant, _I blessed myself in the name of the Glorious Trinity_, with the result that I was unceremoniously bundled out of the place."

The White Knoll had long had the repute of harbouring fairies; Sarah's experiences put the matter beyond all doubt. That worthy female continued to ply her vocation for many years after, with unvarying dexterity and signal success. She was certainly a more prosperous woman after her year's excursion into Fairy-land.

THE MAGIC HERRING.

There is an interesting legend told of the device by which shoals of herring were first induced to come into Loch Broom.

It seems that long ago (the precise date is unessential) the lochs round the island of Lewis were invariably, at the herring season, visited by magnificent shoals of fish, while not a tail was ever seen to twinkle in the spacious waters of Loch Broom. Abundance on one side of the Minch, destitution (for no earthly or apparent reason) on the other! After mature consideration, the dwellers by Loch Broom came to the conclusion that the anomaly could only be explained by the malignant operation of the Lews witches. Query: How best neutralise the spells of these partial harridans? A remedy, both unique and effective, was at length devised. A silver herring was made and given into the hands of a sturdy crew, who set sail with it over the water to Lewis. On arriving there, the men partook of an adequate amount of refreshment, let down the silver fish (attached to a cord) among the jostling shoals in one of the lochs, and then, with the metallic animal trailing in the sea behind them, they turned the prow of the boat in the direction of home. The ruse was successful beyond all belief: glimmering clouds of phosphorence followed through the seas below in the wake of the boat and its silver lure. Under the stars of night, in all the rapture of excitement and success, the Loch Broom fishers led the droves of herring right up to the farthest reach of their loch. The metallic herring was then allowed to sink to the bottom: there it remains, and so long as it is there, an abundant harvest of the deep will be the portion of the resourceful toilers of these shores. Perhaps I ought to mention that the famous boat which did the feat was painted black on one side and red on the other. I am not sufficiently versed in the niceties of _grammarye_ to be able to render a reason for this piebald device.

Of late years, as I have been told, the prosperity of Ullapool is not as high as it was. Can it be that the Lews witches are at their old tricks again? Or has the silver herring been borne, by the wash of retreating surges, out into the Hebridean deep. Every visitor who walks through the sea-facing, white-washed little town, must be struck by the silence of the streets and the utter lack of business animation.

TAISCH.

The most interesting place in the island of Skye is, beyond question, the neighbourhood of Dunvegan. It was of surly, superstitious, loyal-hearted Samuel Johnson that I chiefly thought when I leapt out of the trap that landed me at the Hotel of Dunvegan, for I had just been reading his famous _Journey_, with its diverting remarks on second-sight. It would not, I confess, have surprised me over much, in my tired and wind-beaten condition, to see the Doctor and the Auchinleck laird, walking arm in arm along the road. I should have put it down to a kind of inverted _taisch_, certainly to nothing stronger.

It may surprise many southerners to know that the belief in _taisch_ is not by any means extinct. I have met educated Skyemen who firmly believed in the mysterious visual gifts of the seventh son of a seventh son. In old days, the Highlanders were wont to attribute the gift to none but those of an austere and devout cast, who, living a solitary life in the eye of nature, were thought to be specially prepared for receiving supernatural impressions. I am afraid the vast majority of _taisch_ tales are dreadful nonsense. Mr. MacCulloch, in his recent work on Skye, has usefully summarized the various types of second-sight as expounded by the very credulous Macleod of Hamera: (1) The seer is aware of a phantom winding-sheet enwrapping the doomed person; (2) he may see the corpse of some one still in life; (3) he may behold a drowning or accidental death; (4) he may hear noises as of a coffin being hammered; (5) he may see a living person dwindle to the size of a child, and anon expand to normal bulk. As Johnson remarks, many of the seers declared themselves poignantly afflicted by what they saw. Aubrey tells of a clairvoyant who asked the presbytery to pray that the gift (or curse) might be taken away. Instant prayer removed the obsession.

The extraordinary futility and droll language of the sentences uttered by some of the seers are very mirth-provoking. Here are one or two prophecies of the Brahan Seer:--

"The heir of the Mackenzies will take A white rook out of the wood, And will take a wife from a music-house With his people against him. And the heir will be great In deeds, and as an orator, When the Pope in Rome Will be cast off his throne, Over opposite Creagh-a'-chon Will dwell a little lean tailor," etc.

The following is excellent: "_When the big-thumbed sheriff-officer and the blind man of the twenty-four fingers shall be together in Barra, Macneill may be making ready for the flitting._" It is said that the same seer prophesied thus of the Strathpeffer wells: "The day will come when this disagreeable spring, with thick-crusted surface and unpleasant smell, shall be put under lock and key, so great will be the crowd of people pressing to drink the waters."

Belief in clairvoyance and prophecy was quite common among the Lowland Covenanters; and I believe _Peden's Prophecies_ may still be found among the lumber of the book-shops. An old lady, in Irvine, once repeated to me the following couplet, as having been uttered by Peden:--

"Between Segton and the sea A bloody battle there shall be."

Now, as Segton is the old name for Kilwinning, it would seem that the locale of the battle (probably, as the lady, indeed, thought, the battle of Armageddon) will be _in the immediate neighbourhood of the site at present occupied by Nobell's Dynamite Factory_.

ANTIQUITIES OF DUNVEGAN.

_Taisch_ has taken me a long way from Dunvegan, of which I meant to say something. No souvenir is to me more delicious than that of some days spent there, on one of which I visited the fine old castle of the Macleods, stablished on its rocks, and filled with romance from base to topmost turret. On the landward side are lawns, flowers, and abundance of eye-gladdening leafage, while, seaward, there is the unspeakable glory of isle-dotted loch and distant sea. By the kindness of Macleod of Macleod (you must not call that grand and most genial gentleman by any more garish title: he is _the_ Macleod; he typifies the clan--that is his highest glory), I visited the delightful old castle and saw every room, relic, and dirk of importance. What gave me the most pleasure was the illuminating commentary of Macleod himself and of his charming daughters. One cannot hear the history of some of the rooms without a feeling of terror. In the drawing-room of the castle (the room now used for prayers, and well it may be,) a horrible outrage was planned to take place by Black Ian, a usurping chief. The atrocious deed happened in the middle of the sixteenth century, and was due to Ian's fear that the Campbells, who had landed with a large force in Skye, would expel him from Dunvegan castle. Ian, pretending that he wished to discuss terms, invited eleven of the leading Campbells to a banquet. At table, Macleods and Campbells were seated side by side; and, at a given signal, which consisted in placing a cup of blood in front of each guest, all the Campbells were simultaneously stabbed to death, each Macleod exterminating his man. I was glad to get out of that drawing-room.

The main relics in the castle are: (1) The Fairy Flag; (2) Rory Mor's Drinking-horn; and (3) the Dunvegan Cup.

It is not as well known as it should be that one of the mediaeval chiefs of the Macleods married a fairy. This dainty little woman presented her lord with a yellow silk flag, dotted here and there with red spots. The virtue of the flag, she told him, resided in its efficacy to save the chief of the Macleods on three different occasions. After the third employment of the flag, it would flutter away to fairy-land. The flag has twice saved a chief out of a particularly awkward predicament, and it is still in Dunvegan, though sadly grimed and rent. The present chief, who has served his country nobly, is quite fit, in soldierly fashion, to grapple single-handed with any difficulty he may encounter; but he is in hopes that the flag may yield its residual virtue to the contentment of some one or other of his successors.

Rory Mor's drinking-horn, which could contain, I should think, between two and three bottles of wine, is an interesting indication of pre-Reformation thirst. Of old, each chief as he came of age, was expected to drink off its contents at one draught as a proof that he had arrived at years of discretion.

The cup is made of dark wood, and is finely adorned with silver work. It is dated 1493, and contains a Latin inscription.

The Fairy Tower in Dunvegan Castle contains the room in which Dr. Johnson and Sir Walter Scott slept during their respective visits to the castle. The burly lexicographer would have little wind left for argument after he had toiled up the steep and narrow spiral stairway leading to the room. Formerly, so the smiling chief told me, the young lady chosen by the Macleod to be his wife, had to pass a night alone in this haunted chamber, in order that the fairies might have an opportunity of seeing her, and formally approving the choice.

MISCELLANEOUS TERRORS.

He who investigates Celtic demonology will hear a good deal about a gruesome and insidious animal called the _Water Horse_. This fell beast, though able at need to transform itself into the shape of a human being, is normally like a horse, though much bulkier and fiercer. Its usual abode is in the deep lochs, but it may occasionally be seen, with wreck or sea-weed clinging to its hoof or mane, feeding on the hill-side among earthly horses. The detestable feature about the brute is its fondness for human beings. There is no hope for any man, woman, or child, who gets upon its back: at a furious gallop, the animal bounds off by the nearest road to the loch, and leaps under the waves to devour its prey. Foals of a specially vicious turn are believed to have this brute for their sire: in some such way the furious nature of the horse called "Kelpy" in George Macdonald's story might be explained.

Certain lochs in Skye are believed to harbour a variant terror, the water-bull. Loch Morar, on the mainland, contains a huge mystic bogie, undefined in shape, but of terrible malignity. I have heard too, in Uist, of a phantom dog, with eyes of glede and unearthly bark, that frequents the entrance to the old wayside burying-ground. No driver, unless fortified by several glasses, will drive you that way after dark.

"Duncan," said a commercial traveller to a driver, "I'll have to go to Gruiginish farm to-night. Have everything ready at 8.30."

"I can't do that, Mr. Smith; it'll be dark."

"But you have lamps, Duncan."

"Yes, yes, but I can't go. You have to pass the old cemetery."

"I know that, but I must attend to my business. What ails you at the cemetery?"

"There's the dog at the gate, the dog with the eyes of burning coal. What is he doing there? And the wee man inside, _What is he doing there?_"

"I don't know what he's doing, but to Gruiginish this night I must go. Do you think a glass of _forked lightning_ would do you any good?"

"Well, it might help."

In spite of more than one glass of forked lightning, poor Duncan was in a terrible state of excitement when the cemetery was approached. He kept his head averted, and clutched the reins so nervously that the vehicle was in imminent danger of being upset.

It is a beautiful saying of Goldsmith that innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom. Judged by this standard, the imaginative operations taking place in Duncan's brain, considering their effect on his happiness, cannot be pronounced either innocent or wise. To add ideal terrors to the prosaic hardships of a place like Uist is the very height of folly. And yet it is precisely in such bare and rough regions where man has to fight with nature as with a constant foe, that the unseen powers are believed to be most terrible. The _lutin_ of the smiling land of France is a mere capering trickster, and the "lubber fiend" of Milton's poem is pictured as an unpaid adjunct of the dairy. Duncan's "wee man up on the hill-side" is a permanent and unspeakable horror of the night. "_What is he doing there?_"[29]

[29] Collins's long _Ode on Popular Superstitions in the Highlands of Scotland_, addressed to Home, author of _Douglas_, contains some excellent rhetorical passages. Speaking of the second-sighted seer, Collins represents him as one who

"In the _depth of Uist's dark forest_ dwells."

We may say of Uist what Lord Rosebery said of Caithness, that it is _entirely delivered from the contaminating influence of foliage_. The air one breathes there does not suffer deterioration by coming through any such _dark forest_ as Collins mentions: it blows from the Atlantic in an absolutely pure and strong condition.

ST. KILDA.

St. Kilda, the lonely and precipitous island, forty miles west of Lewis, which Boswell at one time thought of buying, has now, like so many other islands of the West, a well-furnished library from Paisley. I hope the minister of the place encourages the reading of the books, and does everything in his power to broaden the religious views of the people by healthy secular literature. A luckless inspector of schools crossed over once to examine the school of this island. His boat arrived late on Saturday, and was to leave again early on Monday. To suit his own convenience, the greatly-daring official proposed to examine the scholars on Sunday. Never was their such indignation among the islanders. What! examine the school on the first day of the week! Did the unhappy man wish the wrath of Heaven to fall in fire and brimstone on the island? The inspector was angrily hooted and denounced. Still, as he must needs return by his steamer, the islanders agreed to send their children immediately after Sunday was over, _i.e._, _the bairns were assembled at midnight_, and parts of speech were bandied about then in the visible darkness of the tiny school.

St. Kilda belongs to the Macleod, and every spring the factor goes over to collect the rents. All winter the island is isolated, and has no outer news save, perhaps, from some stray Aberdeen trawler. For twenty years the factor went over in a sailing-boat belonging to the chief, but by some mishap, in which no lives were lost, this boat was ill-manoeuvred and, with sails full-set, was engulfed in a whirlpool. He now goes over in the steamer.

The first question propounded to the factor is this: "_Has there been war anywhere, my dear?_" If the answer is "Yes," a great joy is visible on every face. "_That's good, that's good: tell us all about it._" Having heard all about the war, the natives show an eagerness for sweets, of which they are inordinately fond.

The natives are expert cragsmen, and much of their time is occupied in collecting birds' feathers. The oil of the solan goose is also a source of wealth. Rough tweeds are now woven in many of the houses. The factor informed me that, for some unknown reason, everything that comes from the island is impregnated with a heavy odour that is most disagreeable. Means have been tried to neutralise this smell, but success is only for a time: by and by the odour returns, as bad as ever, to fabric and feather. Merchants, both at home and abroad, are loath to purchase such unfragrant wares.

In Dunvegan Castle are to be seen several of the little letter-boats employed by the St. Kildeans to convey news to Scotland in the winter months. The tide is watched, and the letter-boat cast into the sea. Usually the message is washed ashore on some part of the Long Island. Natural superstition supplements, in a small degree, the lack of mails: when the islanders, for example, hear _the notes of the cuckoo_, they are convinced that the Macleod is dead. Happily the cuckoo is rarely heard breaking the silence of the seas so far west.

LADY GRANGE.

To this day there are in the possession of the Macleod family certain old accounts of the years 1744 and 1745, that recall one of the most diabolical and continuous pieces of cruelty recorded in history. I refer to the accounts paid in these years to the Laird of Macleod for the board and burial of Lady Grange. No one who knows the history of that ill-fated lady can look at these time-stained documents without a knocking of the seated heart at the ribs.

Everyone who has enjoyed the light and graceful poetry of Ovid, has sighed over the relegation of that city man to the barbarous horrors of the Black Sea. As Gibbon exquisitely phrases it: "The tender Ovid, after a youth spent in the enjoyment of wealth and luxury, was condemned to a hopeless exile on the frozen banks of the Danube, where he was exposed without remorse to those fierce denizens of the desert with whose stern spirits he feared that his gentle shade might hereafter be confounded." The banishment of Lady Grange to St. Kilda, in 1734, by her rascally husband, is to me fully as pathetic as Ovid's expatriation to Tomi. She, a refined and beautiful woman, the light of Edinburgh drawing-rooms, was hustled off to a lonely rock and left remorselessly to pine there amid the squalls. Let me briefly summarise this affecting history.

Lord Grange, a Scottish judge of strong Jacobite leanings, was known by his Lady to be concerned in a plot, along with Lovat, Mar, and others, to bring back the Pretender. This was in the year 1730. Stung in her wifely pride by her husband's ill-treatment and licentiousness, she openly threatened to expose his treason. To prevent such exposure, Grange caused his wife to be kidnapped and clandestinely conveyed first to a small island off North Uist, and subsequently to St. Kilda. In the latter island, no one could speak any English except the catechist, and here for seven years this polished society dame lived amid the blasts and the screaming ocean-fowl, lacking even the privilege, which Ovid enjoyed, of sending letters to child or friend. In 1741, when the catechist left the island, she made him bearer of letters to her law-agent, Hope of Rankeillor. Hope fitted out a sloop, with twenty-five armed men on board, and set out for St. Kilda to rescue the lady. Macleod, who was, of course, privy to her detention, at once removed her to Skye, and Hope's expedition came to nothing. The poor woman, worn out with sorrow and suffering, died in 1745, a helpless imbecile!

The story, which throws a lurid light on the savagery of the eighteenth century, and which, to my thinking, surpasses in pathos anything occurring in fiction, was long disbelieved. But it was only too true. It is said that ill-luck pursued the lady even after death, and that her funeral was a miserable parody. A coffin filled with stones and turf was interred, before a large crowd, in the churchyard of Duirinish, the real remains being, with maimed rites or none at all, secretly buried elsewhere.

It is noteworthy that Lady Grange died in 1745, the year when Prince Charlie's hopes were shattered on Culloden Moor. Like her, he too had the ill-luck to be a hopeless wanderer in the Misty Isle.

PIERLESS TIREE.

I regret to say that I did not stay long enough in the island of Tiree to add to my store of legends, and yet, I went there with a capacious note-book and excellent intentions. What is more, I read from beginning to end, Dr. Erskine Beveridge's detailed book on the island, and could have passed an examination on semi-brochs, rock-forts, marsh duns, islet-forts, sandhill dwellings, and prehistoric burial-sites. I steeped myself so thoroughly in the _minutiae_ of pre-Reformation churches, that I almost forgot to go to the modern ones. Tiree took hold of me completely, and so did the Norse invaders of the Hebrides--men like Ketil Flatnose, Magnus Barelegs, Hako, and Somerled. I got a pocket map arranged for my own use (copied from Dr. Beveridge's large one) with a red cross at all the sites of ancient forts. It was my fond hope, for pride attends us still, that I might find some inaccuracy in Dr. Beveridge's book, and, from measurements on the spot, be able to contradict some of his statements. But what are the hopes of man! I did not know that predestination, in the form of dirty weather, was working against me, and was about to quench all my interest in _duns_. On September 5th, 1907, I determined to take Dr. Beveridge's measurements for granted.

On that day, in fact, I was for some time under the impression that my last lecture had been delivered. It was on the way between Coll and Tiree. The gale was a furious one and, combined with the greasy odours of the _Fingal_, was enough to sicken a practised seafarer. I did notice that some of the crew were prostrated, so that there was some excuse for a landsman not being proof against Neptune's dandling. So low, exposed, and precarious is the shore at Scarinish, that, often for weeks, the ferrymen dare not venture out to the steamer for passengers. I asked one of the _Fingal_ men if there was any chance of being landed. He was a cruel cynic, and said: "No, not to-day. The sea is too wild for the ferry to come out. We'll go right across to Bunessan in Mull, so prepare for three more hours' shaking. You won't forget the _Dutchman's Cap_ for the rest of your life." Then with a remark addressed to the Creator, he added: "_There's the ferryboat after all; she's racing over the water like a stag._"

He was right: the lugsail was careering out to us and came alongside at length, and, after fearful trouble, got fastened to the _Fingal_. Sometimes the ferryboat was even with our deck, sometimes far above it, sometimes fifteen feet below. It looked like certain death to leap into that lugsail.

I hesitated, and shouted to the captain: "Is it safe to jump?"

He replied, "I wish to Tophet I had the chance."

I watched for the next opportunity of the ferryboat and the _Fingal_ being approximately on the same plane, and leaped into the arms of a boatman.

Other passengers followed,--men, women, even babies. Then came the mails; and finally, live stock. I remember being struck on the mouth by a sheep heaved into the boat by the above-mentioned cynic. "Come, come, that's enough, keep the rest; let us be off," shouted a boatman. Everybody was wet to the skin: the wind was howling; the women weeping; and the babies were mixed up with the sheep.

Once clear of the _Fingal_, the adroit ferrymen did their duty well, and in less than ten minutes we were all landed. A crowd of islanders were waiting to lift us out. All agreed that it had been a _close shave_.

Such was my introduction to _Pierless Tiree_.

I did not stay long enough in the island to measure brochs, but quite long enough to experience the good-will and kindliness of the natives. The houses are solid and substantial, the inhabitants strong and muscular. Great gales from the Atlantic blow almost continually, sweep up the sand in clouds, and prevent any trees from taking root. I did not see much poverty with my own eyes, but the ministers all assured me there was a great deal. Maize, more than oatmeal, is the cereal used for porridge. For supplementary information, Dr. Beveridge's admirable and accurate work may be consulted.

LOCHBUIE IN MULL.

The great straggling island of Mull, so full of scenery, romance, and song, still awaits its historian. Few, who have ever visited the noble isle, will refuse to say with Macphail, the bard of Torosay:

"O the island of Mull is an isle of delight With the wave on the shore and the sun on the height, And the breeze on the hills and the blast on the Bens, And the old green woods and the old grassy glens."

The gem of the island is undoubtedly the haven of Lochbuie, one of the choicest nooks in insular Scotland. The modern mansion, which is but a step or two from the well-preserved castle of olden times, is quite near the shore, and looks straight south over the Atlantic to the island of Colonsay. The entire surroundings are a delight to the eye: great towering mountains behind, the sea in front, and in the space between, green lawns, rocks, gorse, and many-tinted garden-plots.

The MacLaines of Lochbuie trace their descent from the great Gillean of the Battle-axe, a redoubtable warrior who flourished his weapon to some purpose in the reign of Alexander III. But the most notorious of all the MacLaines is _Ewen of the Little Head_, who died in battle, and thereafter assumed the role of family ghost. Before the death of any of his race, this phantom-warrior gallops along the sea-beach near the castle, announcing the event by cries and loud lamentations. The doctor, who attended the present chief's mother, declares that, while sitting beside her bed during the silent watches of the night, he heard the noise of the spectral horse just before the old lady's decease. The natives of Mull can describe the ghost and horse with accurate detail. The horse is a small, hardy, sure-footed animal of brown colour, and Ewen is known by the smallness of his head, and by a long floating mantle of green. He performed a weird and long-continued gallop round the bay in 1815, before the news of the valiant Sir Archibald MacLaine's death became known by official despatch from the seat of war.

Lochbuie, like so many other places in Scotland, has its Piper's Cave. There is a remarkable similarity in all such tales--diversified, however, by quaint local additions. MacLaine's piper, a foolhardy man, determined once to test the allegation that a certain cave on Lochbuie was connected with another cave at Pennygown on the Sound of Mull. Attired in his official costume and having his dog at his heels, he entered the cave, blowing his pipes triumphantly. Those above, on the hills, were able to make out his line of passage by the sound of the music. At a certain point the pipes ceased, and nevermore did the piper come up to the shores of light. The dog got to the cave of Pennygown--a limp and hairless parody of its former self.

Browning, in his "Pied Piper of Hamelin," has but poetised one version of a world-wide tale. Often, in the Highland tales, it is money the piper is after. There is a deep cave near Melvaig, in Wester Ross, into which a piper is said to have led a band of men in search of gold, and never returned. In this case the pipe-music is said to have continued for years--some natives even asserting that it may be heard still by those who have ears to hear.

In spite of all the legendary lore connected with the family of the MacLaines, the chief interest of Lochbuie for a lover of literature, centres round the visit of Boswell and Johnson. In one of the rooms of the castle there is a fine portrait of Johnson. On looking at it, my mind reverted to the amusing question addressed to the sage by the "bluff, comely, noisy old gentleman" who was the laird of Lochbuie in 1773: "Are you of the Johnstons of Glencro or of Ardnamurchan?" "Dr. Johnson," says Boswell, "gave him a significant look, but made no answer; and I told Lochbuie that he was not Johnston, but Johnson, and that he was an Englishman."

I regret to say that the great war saddle, which was in Lochbuie's possession in 1773, and which Boswell did not see because the young laird had taken it to Falkirk with a drove of black cattle, is no longer in the island: somebody took it to America, and forgot to bring it back.

The present laird is greatly beloved by his tenantry. At the lecture I gave at Lochbuie, he was unable, owing to illness, to take the chair. His absence was a terrible grief to the people, and the piper of the family, in a brief speech, alluded in a most touching way to the sorrow felt by all present.[30]

INVERARAY CASTLE.

Three days after Johnson and his friend left Lochbuie, they were entertained by the Duke of Argyll in Inveraray Castle. Boswell's description of the incidents of this visit is one of his finest efforts. He tells us that Johnson admired the "utter defiance of expense" shown by the Duke in the building and appointments of the place. Records exist which show that the masons were paid at the rate of 41/2d. a day, _plus_ a weekly bonus of meal!

It is interesting to note that the Rev. John Macaulay (grandfather of Lord Macaulay) was one of the ministers of Inveraray in 1773. Boswell gives him a very high character, but this had no emollient effect on the great historian, when he came to review _Croker's Edition of Boswell's Johnson_.

Inveraray Castle is a superb object-lesson in Scotch history. All the Campbells of note for centuries past are hanging on the walls, from the old Duke who passed away last, to the squinting Marquis (_Gleed Argyll_ mentioned in the "Bonnie House o' Airlie"), who was beheaded on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh in 1661. The Duke, who commanded at Sheriffmuir ("when we ran and they ran, and they ran and we ran," etc.) is standing in his accoutrements of pride, painted by the son of Allan Ramsay:

"Argyll the State's whole thunder, born to wield And shake alike the Senate and the Field."

Mediaeval armour, firelocks from Culloden, flags from a score of battlefields, mutely suggest the glory and gore of the olden times. It is impossible to walk through the rooms of such a place without feeling intimately in touch with the events of the past.

The present hotel is the one in which Johnson and his biographer lodged. Burns came sixteen years later, and wrote on the pane of his bedroom window the scandalous epigram on Inveraray so often quoted. The present Duke (who has perpetrated a fair amount of poetry himself) would give much of his odd cash to recover that pane, which was cut out some years ago by a pilfering visitor.[31]

[30] I am inclined to think that the relationship formerly existing between the Highland chief and the member of his clan was perfect in its way--a _model_ of class relationship. There was nothing menial about the clansman's attitude, though he gave unbounded homage to his lord. At the battle of Inverkeithing, a clansman and his seven sons gave up their lives to shield from death their chieftain, Sir Hector Maclean. As the old man saw his boys fall one after the other, he shouted with glee and pride, "_Another for Sir Hector!_" until he himself lay, like a true thane, beside his progeny. Nothing could be finer or more touching than such a scene.

[31] Burns tells us that when in Inveraray Hotel, he was entirely neglected by the servants, who gave all their attention to some gentlemen from the Castle. In our day, the Campbells have shown contrition by their willingness to admit that Burns was one of their own clan. Burns's ancestors were, it is said, Campbells of Taynuilt. Taynuilt means in English, Burnhouse. When the poet's ancestors emigrated to Forfarshire, they were known as _Campbells from Burnhouse_. In course of time the appellation was shortened into Burnhouse simply, and latterly into Burness or Burns.--Q.E.D.

THE SACRED ISLE.

Wordsworth came to Iona (which also belongs to the Argyll family) in 1833, and wrote four poor sonnets on the sacred isle. This is what he saw:

"To each voyager Some ragged child holds up for sale a store Of wave-worn pebbles, pleading on the shore Where once came monk and nun with gentle stir."

Owing to its ecclesiastical renown as the cradle of Christianity in Britain, no island is so much visited as Iona. The audience I addressed was the most miscellaneous I have ever seen: there were boatmen and barristers, anglers and artists, curates and crofters, French and Germans.

The present-day natives seem desirous of keeping up the old reputation for theology. The boatman who ferries visitors ashore, remarked to me with pride that his favourite book was one entitled _The Great Controversy between God and the Devil_, a book with which I was, and am still, unacquainted.

Dr. Johnson's remarks on Iona remain the most eloquent tribute to the island. He never wrote anything finer. All the children in the Iona school should be made to learn the piece by heart.[32]

It is most gratifying to think that Christianity has been the great purifying force in Europe. The introduction of Christianity into the world must be reckoned as the most revolutionary event of history. Nothing was ever more needed. To one who knows the morality of the most brilliant society of the Greeks and Romans, there is no need to extol the pure and lofty moral tone of Jesus of Nazareth. But those who have not read the masterpieces of ancient art, with their mingled beauty and foulness, may be assured that literature owes more to Christianity than has ever yet been told. With Christianity a great healthy breeze swept over the world. Men became ashamed of wallowing in the mire. An ideal was raised up before them for their worship and imitation. The old Adam and his deeds needed stern repression after the wild iniquities of the effete society of imperial Rome. The spirit needed to curb the flesh, literature needed to be cleansed. We, living to-day and nursed on the accumulated tradition of so many anterior Christian centuries, are sometimes disposed to minimise the debt we owe, in pure and simple morality, to the teachings of the New Testament. I find it impossible to imagine what the world would be without these teachings. They renewed the world, they made it do penance for its sins, they made advance practicable. An entirely retrograde movement is impossible when once man is indoctrinated with a grand ideal.

[32] Boswell's religious instincts come well out in his account of the visit to Iona. Two of his descendants, Messrs. Albert and James Boswell, devoted themselves entirely to religion, and were well known in Ayrshire, thirty years ago, as zealous evangelists. These two gentlemen went on a preaching campaign through the northern islands, and did much highly appreciated philanthropic and religious work there. They were members of the sect called Plymouth Brethren.

APPIN.

In this chapter (as, indeed, in all the others) I am rummaging among my souvenirs for materials that are in some way noteworthy. It is utterly impossible to exhaust the romance and glamour of the Highlands. Those who go regularly North are certain to bring back, on each occasion, a host of interesting memories. "Swift as a weaver's shuttle fly our years": the chief difficulty is to jot down all that one sees and hears.

On the occasion of my second visit to Appin, I stayed in the fine new hotel built on the eminence called Druim-an-t-Sealbhain. The landlord is a man of great wit and reading, and with him I had some enjoyable hours of miscellaneous conversation. Mr. Macdonald (for that is his name) has an excellent knowledge of the Celtic dialects, has translated into Gaelic verse some of the best-known poems of Burns, Tannahill, and Byron, and is extremely clever at retailing the legendary tales that still go rumouring along the Strath of Appin. He has also a good knowledge of English literature, and told me certain details regarding Scott and Wordsworth which I was pleased to know.

It seems that Sir Walter was at one time tutor in Appin House, and was in the habit of visiting the cot of an old shepherd, a notorious _seanachie_, full of romantic lore, for the purpose of hearing, and writing down, the old man's tales. An oak tree is still pointed out, under which, it is said, Scott composed part of _The Lord of the Isles_. Appin is not very far from the castles of Dunollie and Dunstaffnage, which Sir Walter wrought skilfully into the texture of his tales.

The most interesting item mentioned by Mr. Macdonald had reference to the visit of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, in the year 1803. Everyone who has read the life of the great poet of Nature knows the charming description of the district contained in one of his sister's letters. "We arrived," she says, "at Port-na-croish. It is a small village--a few huts and an indifferent inn, by the side of the loch; ordered a fowl for dinner, had a fire lighted, and went a few steps from the door up the road, and turning aside into a field, stood at the top of a low eminence, from which, looking down the loch to the sea through a long vista of hills and mountains, _we beheld one of the most delightful prospects that, even when we dream of fairer worlds than this, it is possible to conceive in our hearts_." Here follows a description so exquisite of the sea-scenery and the Morven Hills, that it deserves to be classed with the finest examples of word-painting in the English language.

The new hotel at Appin is built on the low eminence referred to in the above-cited letter. The name Druim-an-t-Sealbhain is giving way to the complimentary title of "Dorothy Wordsworth's View." From the front windows of the hotel, the same calm inland seas, grassy hills, Morven mists, grim old forts, and intricate communion of land and water, can be seen precisely as they were seen by the Wordsworths more than a century ago. The Port-na-croish inn has become a village store: it is well worthy of note, not merely for the reference in the letter, but for a fine legend, which I shall now narrate.

MACDONALD'S GRATITUDE.

The first tenant of the inn was a Macdonald of Glencoe, a man between sixty and seventy at the time of the story, the year 1755 namely. He had around him a family of stalwart sons, all imbued with intense hatred of the clan Campbell. The peculiar and fiendish malignity of the terrible massacre of Glencoe precluded all possibility of forgiveness on the part of the clan. Highland hospitality has always been a lavish and magnificent thing, and Colonel Campbell and his assassins had been treated with exceptional kindness in Glencoe. The bloody outrage, in a midnight of winter snows, was too terrible a meed of hospitality to be readily forgotten or forgiven by the Macdonalds. This old innkeeper of Port-na-croish, then, hated the Campbells with the unquenchable hate that deep wrongs, done not alone to an individual but to a tribe, engender in the Celtic soul.

One day a white-bearded wayfarer begged food and shelter in the little hostel, and in the course of conversation over the meal that was soon spread on the board for his wants, he let slip an avowal that, in his youth, as one of Campbell's men, he had taken part in the gruesome massacre of the "valley of weeping." Without more ado, the landlord slipped out and posted his sons at the door, with whispered orders to them that the stranger should be dirked to death on crossing the threshold of the inn. Returning indoors, old Macdonald, dissimulating his fell intentions, proceeded to ply the visitor with question upon question, so as to gain a detailed knowledge of all the incidents of the weird carnage. Finally he said, "Tell me, Campbell, what part of that devilish business made the strongest impression on your mind?" "I will tell you," said the old soldier, "what to me was the outstanding incident of that night. Towards the close of the massacre, a child's voice was heard piercingly on the night air--a scream it was, and seemed to come from no great distance. The captain sent me in the direction of the sound, bidding me, if the child should be a male Macdonald, to kill it forthwith; if a girl, to spare. I soon came up to the place whence the sound proceeded, and saw through the whirling snow, under the protection of a jutting cliff, a nurse with a boy of four years old, both of them wailing and shivering with cold. The child was gnawing a bone and, near by, a dog was crouching. Pity wrung my heart. I drove my bayonet through the trembling cur, and, going back to the captain, showed him the bloody steel as a proof that I had obeyed his commands."

The innkeeper, who had been all ears, said: "You, then, were that soldier?" "I was, indeed," replied the old wanderer. "_And I was that child!_" said the landlord, "and _your_ life is saved. My sons stand at the threshold of the inn, ready to fall upon you when you leave. I countermand the order for your destruction. Here you shall stay, an honoured guest, till the end of your days, as a recompense for saving my life on that awful night."

The story goes on to state that the foot-weary Campbell lived for some years a pensioner in Port-na-croish inn, and was buried at the expense of the grateful innkeeper. I do not know any story that comes nearer perfection.

NOTES ON THE TROSSACHS.

The Rev. Mr. Wilson, the cultured and genial minister of the Trossachs, has recently published a most readable little book on the district he knows so well. Perhaps no district indeed on the world's surface is so well known (even to those who have never seen it), as the Trossachs. Little did Sir Walter suspect, when he penned the stirring iambics of _The Lady of the Lake_, that he was furnishing materials to the pedagogue which would be parsed, analysed, and dissected by myriads of pupils in all the schools of the British Empire. We shall all carry with us to the grave the leading passages of that romantic lay: the stag-hunt, the duel at Coilantogle Ford, the whistle that garrisoned the glen, and the episode of the Fiery Cross. Such lines, we may say, have gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Happening to pass Strathyre station in July, 1907, I was requested by a bright-eyed little Japanese gentleman in the compartment to tell him where we were. On being informed, he (after casting an eye of pity on the deplorable stork that is supposed to decorate the drinking-fountain of the station), began to declaim, in capital English, the passage that begins--

"Benledi saw the Cross of Fire, It glanced like lightning up Strathyre, O'er dale and hill the summons flew, Nor rest nor pause young Angus knew; The tear that gathered in his eye He left the mountain breeze to dry."

Mr. Wilson's book to which I have alluded is a collection of the impressions written down by eminent visitors to the locality, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Queen Victoria. Carlyle, who was in Perthshire in 1818, wrote the following note, which, though short, is finely characteristic of him: "The Trossachs I found really grand and impressive, Loch Katrine exquisitely so, my first taste of the beautiful in scenery. Not so, any of us, the dirty, smoky farm-hut at the entrance, with no provision in it but bad oatcakes and unacceptable whisky, or the Mrs. Stewart who somewhat royally presided over it, and dispensed these dainties, expecting to be flattered like an independency, as well as paid like an innkeeper." The foregoing note, by itself, is good value for the cost of Mr. Wilson's book (two shillings, namely), and raises regrets that the author of _Sartor_ did not travel oftener through the Land of Cakes. (The only other place in the Highlands where I have heard Carlyle spoken of, is Kyleakin in Skye, where he was the guest of Lady Ashburton, and where (as the natives say), the cocks and hens had to be removed out of ear-shot for his convenience.)

One of Mr. Wilson's stories (contributed by a lady) is apposite at the present time, when so much is being heard of women's rights. Glengyle, a district of the Trossachs, was once _entirely ruled_ by a number of women, who constituted a sort of High Court with women as Judge and Jury. "The most notorious case which they dealt with, and which probably led to their downfall through drawing the ridicule of the country upon them, was a case of horse-stealing. The accused man had been seen riding furiously away on someone else's horse, and all evidence pointed to his guilt. To the astonishment of the outsiders, the jury returned a verdict of 'not guilty,' and the Judge on summing up declared the horse was the culprit, as it had run away with the man. _She condemned the unfortunate animal to be hanged, and hanged it was, while the man got off scot free._"

LOCHFYNE-SIDE.

None of the mainland counties of Scotland can boast of such wonderful ramifications of sea and loch as the county of Argyll. The present amiable and cultured head of the Clan Campbell declaimed, with great applause, at a social gathering not long ago, a fine poem, in which the beauties of his ancestral shire were floridly--but not unjustly--elaborated. It would be difficult to over-praise the county of Argyll, with its splendid sea-board, its rugged and impressive peaks, and its unrivalled fiords and lakes. Thanks to its proximity to large centres of population, few counties are so much visited. Its fame, in our day, is likely to be more widespread than ever, owing to the graceful and entertaining writings of Mr. Neil Munro, who probably knows the details of its local history better than any man living, and who possesses the inimitable art of interesting others in his delineations of the past. I confess that I feel, personally, as much interest in the Wars of Lorn as I do in the Siege of Sphacteria, and that "Glee'd Argyll" seems fully as attractive as Cleon or Brasidas.

Of course, long before Mr. Munro, Loch Fyne had a European reputation, which it owed to its herring. The Popes of Rome used to eat these herring in mediaeval times, and sent for them _via_ Amsterdam or Antwerp. Orthodox Catholics have always had good judgment in the matter of fish, and especially the French, who belong to a country which proudly boasts of being _the eldest daughter of the Church_. For many a generation the French came annually to Lochgilphead, and bartered their kegs of claret for barrels of salt herring. The French Revolution, among its many other effects, put a stop to this trade. War lasted for so many years between Britain and France, that, at the end of it all, the continental sailors had forgotten the way to Loch Fyne.

Argyllshire is rich in legends, for many of which no date can be given except the elastic one _long ago_ or _in byegone times_. Let me cite one or two of these:--

MACIVORS, MACVICARS, AND MACALLISTERS.

On the road to Kilmartin is a place called the Robber's Den, the locality of which may be firmly fixed in the tourist's memory by noting that it is just behind a large distillery. Here, long ago, lived one Macvicar, whose wife was a Macivor. These names are important, and so also is that of the Macallisters of Tarbert, who one day stole cattle belonging to the Macivors. Mrs. Macvicar noticed these Tarbert scoundrels driving her father's cattle through the glen, and mentioned the fact to her boy. Young Macvicar followed the robbers, and found them in a forest feeding joyously on a slain bullock belonging to his grandfather. As each Macallister finished picking a bone, he would throw it violently against a big stone, remarking at the same time, with a chuckle: "_If a Macivor were here, that's how I would treat him_." The boy, from his hiding-place in the foliage, threw a stone and struck one of the feasters. The injured man blamed one of his own clansmen, and, after much recrimination, a free fight of Macallisters was the result. During the melee, the boy slunk off and told his mother's family what was happening. The Macivors, in a furious and determined band, soon fell upon their disordered foes, and completely routed them and regained their cattle, _minus_ the consumed bullock. The chief of the Macallisters was slain by a woman, who took off her stocking, placed a _large stone therein_, and heaved it at his head. That same night, Mrs. Macallister, wife of the chieftain thus ignominiously laid low, gave birth, perhaps prematurely, to a son, whom the care of a discriminate midwife secreted from the vengeance of the Macivors, who were howling all round the house. This child grew up to manhood with the picture of the stone-laden stocking ever before his mind's eye. He prepared a most effective retaliation: he sent to Ireland and got over a large band of Antrim men, who were quite pleased to help him in his bloody projects. The Macivors were completely overpowered, and even the Macvicars had a taste of Irish steel. Macvicar, father of the boy who distinguished himself in the wood, was attacked in his own house. He was an athlete of great powers, and was _able to jump thirty feet either in a backward or a forward direction_. The Irishmen set fire to his house, and Macvicar--hoping, no doubt, to make a final leap for life--tried to escape by the chimney. His foes struck him on the knee with a spear: he fell into their hands, and was at once despatched.

RED HECTOR.

We hear a good deal of the Irish in the traditions of Argyllshire. The ruthless Colkitto, notorious for his own deeds and also for Milton's mention of him, brought over a contingent of men from Ireland to help Montrose in the Royalist wars. These auxiliaries swooped down on Kintyre, murdered hundreds of Campbells, and devastated with fire and sword the whole of Argyll's country. To this period belongs the story of Red Hector and the Irish colossus, Phadrig Mor.

Hector was a little, red-haired kern of the Campbell clan, who was caught by Colkitto's men skulking in the wood, and dragged with pinioned arms before the son of that bandit. Hector was about to be hanged without more ado, but as preparations were being made he cried out: "_Give me a sword and I'll fight any one of you. If I am beaten, kill me then._" The Irishmen, to whom an "illigant foight" has always been welcome, agreed to the proposal of Red Hector. They chose Phadrig Mor, a fierce giant of a man, to fight with the little fellow. The latter, to neutralise the advantages of Phadrig's stature, leapt nimbly on the sawn stump of a tree, and, in an attitude of defence, awaited the oncoming of his foe. The wee man parried most dexteriously every blow that Phadrig wished to deal, and there was much mirth and excitement among the spectators. At length, seeing a terrific blow coming his way, Hector speedily leapt off the trunk of the tree, and the Irishman's sword came fiercely down and was embedded in the timber. Now was Hector's chance: he laid about the defenceless giant to such purpose that Phadrig was soon a corpse.

MACPHAIL OF COLONSAY.

Leyden, the polyglott poet, has written a poem on an Argyllshire tradition attaching to the whirlpool of Corryvreckan. Near that dreaded tumult of waters, Macphail, a Colonsay man, was pulled out of his boat by a mermaid, and taken down to her shell-strewn chamber at the bottom of the sea. They stayed for years together, and five little, unbaptized Macphails claimed him at length as their sire. By and by he grew tired of the eternal swirling of the currents, the saltwater garden growths, and the irritating deflection of the sunlight. His mind continued to revert to Colonsay and the girl he had left behind him there. One day he got the mermaid to take him near the strand of his native island, whereupon he suddenly leapt ashore and escaped. In future years he avoided the sea as much as possible, preferring to devote his time and talents to cultivating the soil of Colonsay.

TALES FROM SPEYSIDE.

Part of my purpose in this chapter is to show to any of my readers who may have poetical talents, that abundance of material for verse, and that of the most pathetic, thrilling, and gruesome kind, is still to be found in the North country. No one since Scott has thought fit to draw much on traditions of the Highlands: and though Scott poetised a great many of these, plenty of them still remain unsung. Many fine tales are associated with the delightful district of Speyside.

TOM EUNAN!

Near the little village of Kincraig is a queer old church built on a hill called Tom Eunan, just beside the Spey. This church is declared to be the only one in Scotland in which services have been continuously held since the seventh century. The outside is antique in the extreme; inside, there have been renovations: there is a deal of varnished wainscoating that would have scared the Culdees, and instead of the uneven cobble stones of old, there is a modern floor of wood. On one of the windows of the church, there is a fine old bronze bell that exists as a relic of Culdee times. Some profane person once laid hands on this bell and carried it off to Perth; but it _would not_ ring away from Speyside. To speak figuratively, the bell was broken-hearted: from its metallic tongue, night and day, came the mournful wail, "Tom Eunan, Tom Eunan." I am happy to say that it was brought back to its beloved hillock.

Rural churches with earthen floors were not uncommon in Scotland even in the nineteenth century: in such there would be no great trouble in interring the dead. Two Speyside stories, dealing with kirks and kirkyards, are told of the Grants of Rothiemurchus.

SHAWS AND GRANTS.

For several generations the possession of Rothiemurchus was a constant subject of dispute between the Shaws and the Grants. The Shaws were the original owners, but having waxed fat and kicked against the Government on more than one occasion, word was sent from Edinburgh to one of the Grants, who was Laird of Muckerach, that he should dispossess the Shaws of the lands of Rothiemurchus, _gin he could_. Grant was by no means "blate" in availing himself of the hint, but the Shaws were tough fighters. In a final and decisive contest between the two clans, the Grants were victorious and the chief of the Shaws slain. The victorious Muckerach, now unequivocal Laird of Rothiemurchus, caused his dead rival to be buried deep down within the kirk beneath his own seat. Every Sunday _when he went to pray_ he stamped his feet triumphantly upon the place under which lay the corpse of his enemy.

Patrick Grant, surnamed Macalpine, cuts a rather picturesque figure in clan history. With a body of gaily-dressed retainers he paraded round the countryside, dispensing justice and letting the minimum of time elapse between the sentence and the execution. He was twice married, and his second wife survived him. That forlorn lady had much to endure from the first family, and notably from the wife of Macalpine's eldest son and heir. The widow took a very dramatic way of publicly showing her grievances. Once after the service in the kirk was over, she stepped up, with her fan in her hand, to the corner of the kirkyard, and, taking off her high-heeled slipper, she tapped with it on the stone laid over her husband's grave, crying out through her tears, "_Macalpine! Macalpine! rise up for ae half-hour and see me richted!_"

A diverting legend explains the _low-lying situation of Ballindalloch Castle_, a beautiful specimen of baronial architecture, standing near the junction of the Spey and the Avon. In planning the place, somewhere about 1545, the laird fully intended to secure a wide prospect, and to that end, chose a commanding site. But his views did not commend themselves to the Powers of the Air, and the masons could make no progress. Every night, when the workers had retired from building the walls, a prodigious gale came roaring from the summit of Ben Rinnes and swept stones and mortar into the bed of the Avon. The laird, sorely puzzled at this strange phenomenon, lay in watch one night, with the result that he was blown off his feet, and landed right up among the branches of a holly-tree. Having taken the conceit out of the laird in this abrupt way, the Mysterious Power, chuckling in fiendish fashion, called out "_Build on the cow-haugh_." Frightened out of his wits, the laird was only too glad to comply.

THE WISHING WELL.

Round the old Castle of Rothes clings a legend of a more pathetic kind. "Fierce wars and faithful loves shall moralise my song," says Spenser, and it is with these well-worn but ever-fresh subjects that the story deals. The heiress of one of the old lairds of Rothes, being allowed to roam at will with her foster-mother, cast an eye of love on the son of the laird of Arndilly. As in ballad lore, the love seems to have been immediate, reciprocal, and unquenchable. The girl's father, hearing of the attachment, summarily forbade it, and commanded his daughter to turn her back on young Arndilly, and take a different road in future. But as journeys end in lovers meeting, the two young people, by whatever way they set out, invariably met at the _Wishing Well_. A sad severance came, however, for young Arndilly, like so many mediaeval knights of song who had faithful mistresses, must needs go crusading to the Holy Land. During his absence, the lady hied daily to the Wishing Well, and many a tear she let fall therein as she thought of the lad that was so far away. But after many a month, back from Palestine came young Arndilly, and went, of course, straight to the old trysting-place, where he found his lady-love praying for his safe return. The meeting was rapturous but tragically short. A dark shape glided upon the scene, and drove a fatal dirk in the young soldier's back. The lady shrieked aloud and swooned away. For the rest of her life she was an imbecile: she never left the castle, and spent her time crooning a plaintive song and rocking a cradle. Her ghost still haunts the place, and those who have ears to hear can, at nightfall, make out, above the sough of the wind, the mournful notes of a weird lullaby, and mysterious cradle-rockings within the ruined walls. Close by the Well, at the spot of the murder, a bush sprang up, whereof the leaves resembled crosses; in autumn they turned to a bright scarlet colour, as if typical of the blood that had flowed there from its victim's wounds. Others will have it that the lady's ghost may be seen flitting about, distractedly, in the woods, on a particular night of the year--the anniversary, it is supposed, of Arndilly's murder.

OSSIAN AND MACPHERSON.

The beautiful little town of Kingussie is famous for its association with "Ossian" Macpherson, who was born near by. No man, born on Scottish earth, except perhaps, Sir Walter Scott, had ever such an influence on European literature as this Highland dominie. "His Ossian," as Professor Macmillan Brown says, "was translated into almost every European language; and its influence is apparent in Goethe's Werther, in Schiller's Robbers, and in all the Storm-and-Stress literature of Germany, in the productions and speeches of the French Revolutionists, in the romantic literary movement that preceded and followed the Revolution, and in much of the Italian, Spanish, and Danish poetry of the time. It generally affected the prose style of eighteenth century romance, and was a direct antidote to Johnsonianism in the imaginative literature. In our own century it bent the genius of Scott to the Highlands, and moulded the dramas of Byron, and the often vague imagery of Shelley; it appears in the style of Kingsley's Hereward, and directly or indirectly it is responsible for the pioneering efforts of Walt Whitman in prose poetry and for the rapid growth of poetic prose through De Quincey, Bulwer Lytton, and Ruskin. During last century it stirred Blake to misty prophecies, led writers of romance back into the less known periods of the past, and gave the new audience a delight in mysterious and almost formless legend and tale and idea."

The extraordinary vogue of Macpherson's Ossianic poems was due to literary merit of a high order, and also to the parched and dry state into which the poetry of Europe had sunk in the middle of the eighteenth century. Boileau and his rules had crushed all sap and life out of European verse, and the poet had become either a teacher of rimed ethics or a framer of dexterous satire. How refreshing Ossian must have been to the men of such a time:

"The hills were round them, and the breeze Went o'er the sun-lit fields again; Their foreheads felt the wind and rain."

Let the modern reader go through the _Rape of the Lock_, and then take up the song of the hunter Shilric from Macpherson's "Carric-thura."

Shilric, not knowing that his love Vinvela is dead, thus communes with himself:

"I sit by the mossy mountain; on the top of the hill of winds. One tree is rustling above me. Dark waves roll over the heath. The lake is troubled below. The deer descend from the hill. No hunter at a distance is seen. It is mid-day; but all is silent. Sad are my thoughts alone. Didst thou but appear, O my love! a wanderer on the heath! thy hair floating on the wind behind thee; thy bosom heaving on the sight; thine eyes full of tears for thy friends, whom the mist of the hill had concealed! Thee I would comfort, my love, and bring thee to thy father's house!"

To him mourning thus, the spirit of his dead love appears:

"But is it she that there appears, like a beam of light on the heath? bright as the moon in autumn, as the sun in a summer-storm, comest thou, O maid, over rocks, over mountains to me? She speaks: but how weak her voice! like the breeze in the reeds of the lake.

"'Alone I am, O Shilric! alone in the winter-house. With grief for thee I fell. Shilric, I am pale in the tomb.'

"She fleets, she sails away; as mist before the wind! and wilt thou not stay, Vinvela? Stay and behold my tears! fair thou appearest, Vinvela! fair thou wast, when alive!

"By the mossy mountain I will sit; on the top of the hill of winds. When mid-day is silent around, O talk with me, Vinvela! come on the light-winged gale! on the breeze of the desert, come! Let me hear thy voice, as thou passest, when mid-day is silent around.'"

The readers of the eighteenth century did not stay to consider whether the foregoing was, or was not, a genuine antique: it suited their taste admirably. Rousseau had brought sentimentalism into favour; the "return to nature" was a kind of creed with the French philosophers: these facts aided greatly in causing the epidemic of Ossianism that overran Europe.

I should not like to be condemned to read nothing but Ossian for a year. The short staccato sentences, the difficulty of getting hold of anything definite amid so many moonbeams, gliding ghosts, whistling reeds, and feasts of shells, has a very debilitating effect on the mind. There is too much weeping: one is constantly saying with Tennyson, "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean." Yet, no one can dip into Macpherson without being rewarded by some phrase of an impressive or refreshing kind, _e.g._:--

"Thou art with the years that are gone; thou fadest on my soul."

"Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days?"

"Her steps were like the music of songs; she saw the youth and loved him. He was the stolen sigh of her soul."

"Why does Ossian sing? Soon shall he lie in the narrow house, and no bard shall raise his fame."

"When shall it be morn in the grave to bid the slumberer wake?"

"Mixed with the murmur of waters rose the voice of aged men, who called the forms of night to aid them in the war."

"Autumn is dark on the mountains; grey mist rests on the hills."

AT THE FOOT O' BENNACHIE.

I have on several occasions, during the last year or two, visited that part of Aberdeenshire which is immediately under the glorious ridge of Bennachie. Like all lovers of ballad lore, I know by heart the poem of the little wee man who had such prowess, and who invited the poet to go with him to his green bower. After seeing magnificent examples of dancing, the poet found himself lying in the mist at the foot of Bennachie:--

"Out went the lichts, on cam' the mist, Leddies nor mannie mair could I see; I turned aboot, and gave a look, I was just at the foot o' Bennachie."

The exquisite little ballad from which I quote is calculated to raise expectations of beauty which the picturesque surroundings of Bennachie are well able to satisfy. Great tracts of Aberdeenshire are flat, treeless, and painful in their monotony; in winter, great gusts sweep the cold plains, and make driving or walking a trying ordeal; the country is thinly peopled, and the impression of the visitor is that, in some districts, railway stations are more numerous than villages. Round Bennachie, however, the scenery is most pleasant and picturesque. The villages of Oyne and Insch, in which hospitality to strangers is a religion, are beautifully placed and well-foliaged all around. The region is, indeed, one of romance, and the little brook of Gadie ripples on in the radiance and glamour of pathetic song.

HARLAW.

Those who consider, like Ruskin, that the stories of the past add no inconsiderable item to the beauty of a landscape, as it appears to the eye and intelligence of modern observers, will not fail to remember the momentous issues decided at no great distance from the foot of Bennachie, in 1411. Teutonic and Celtic Scotland came to grips at Harlaw, near by:--

"The Hielandmen, wi' their lang swords, They laid on us fu' sair; And they drave back our merry men Three acres' breadth and mair.

. . . . . . . . . .

Gin anybody speer at ye For them we took awa', Ye may tell them plain and very plain, They're sleeping at Harlaw."

Burton, in his _History of Scotland_, declares that the check given to Donald of the Isles at Harlaw, was a greater relief to Scotland than even Bannockburn was. If the Stuart kings, hard pressed as they were by England on the south, had been threatened by a formidable Celtic sovereignty on the north, Holyrood might have been in ruins a good many centuries earlier. I am not going to shock my Highland friends by saying it was a good thing for the country that Donald, with the remnant of his plaids and claymores, had to retreat to the misty straths and islands of the west. The coalition of Celt and Teuton has taken place in an unostentatious way, to the advantage of both races: Macfadyen does not now, as in the days of Dunbar, bide "_far norrart in a neuk_;" he has come to the Lowlands long ago, and rarely goes North, except on holiday. And the language, which to the finical ears of James Fourth's poet-laureate, seemed too terrible even for the devil to tolerate, has come south, too, and has a chair all to itself in the University of Edinburgh. _Time_, says Sophocles, _is a god who performs difficult things with ease_.

Mention of Harlaw suggests a comic tale told to the credit of the Provost of Inverness. That gentleman, on being threatened with a predatory visit from Donald in 1400, took the remarkable plan of sending an ample supply of Inverness whisky into the Celtic camp. The men of Lewis and Skye tackled the liquid bounty with great glee, and soon were in a state of maudlin intoxication. The wily Provost meanwhile collected a force and attacked Donald's men, who (as they magnified the attacking host to _double its real numbers_) were easily scared and routed. At Harlaw, eleven years later, the Provost of Aberdeen, evidently a man who lacked the resource of the chief magistrate of Inverness, was killed, and 500 men with him.

LOCHABER REIVERS.

The predatory habits of the Highlanders gave great trouble to the Aberdeenshire farmers _for fully three hundred years after Harlaw_. In 1689 a dozen wild Lochaber men came right down into the heart of Aberdeenshire and lifted six score of black cattle. The fate of the marauders is thus described by the author of _Johnny Gibb_:--

"They were pursued by a body of nearly 50 horsemen, well mounted and armed, and each carrying bags of meal and other provisions, both for their own support, and to offer in ransom for the cattle, if peaceful negotiations could be carried through. On through the hills, over marshes, rocks, and heather, the spirited horsemen followed, under their leader; and guided by a herd-boy whom they encountered, they traced the robbers by Loch Ericht side into the heart of their own country. At nightfall, they came upon them at Dalunchart, encamped and busily engaged roasting a portion of the flesh of one of the cattle they had stolen. They offered, after some parley, to give each of the freebooters a bag of meal and a pair of shoes in ransom for the cattle. The Highlanders treated such an offer for cattle driven so far and with so much trouble with contempt; the herd was gathered in, and the fight began in deep earnest, the result being that the Lochaber men were all shot down, killed or wounded, except three, who escaped unhurt to tell the tale; and the cattle were, of course, recovered."

REAY AND TWICKENHAM.

Perhaps the least attractive of the Scotch counties, in respect of scenery, is Caithness. The North-going train enters it a little after Helmsdale, and from thence to Thurso the journey is of a most dreary and depressing character. He who wishes to see the romantic part of the county should quit the train at Helmsdale, and go right to John o' Groats by the shore road: thereafter he should proceed along the line of the Pentland Firth to the dainty town of Thurso and to the village of Reay, the citadel of the Mackays. The district round Reay is a delightful one, and has great historical interest.

Some good examples of the power assumed of old by the country ministers are furnished by a perusal of the life of an eighteenth century minister, the Rev. Alexander Pope, who was stationed for many years in Reay. He was a huge giant of a man, and invariably carried about with him a nail-studded cudgel that was a terror to sinners. A lout of a fellow in his parish refused to come to church and get rebuked for an infringement of the usual commandment. Mr. Pope sent three elders with ropes to pinion the adulterer, hale him to church, and fasten him to a conspicuous pew right under the pulpit. The minister cannonaded the culprit to his heart's content, beginning thus: "_Shame, shame, son of a beggar, where art thou now?_"

Another parishioner who neglected family worship on the ground that he could not make up a prayer, was severely taken to task by Mr. Pope, who gave the man a year within which to manufacture one. At the end of the twelvemonth, Mr. Pope called and requested to hear the prayer. The man glibly rattled off a long succession of phrases that did not please the minister at all. "That won't do," he said, "you must prepare over again." "And is all my long labour to go for nothing," said the man, "all my year's toil? No, no: rather than lose my labour, I'll _break the prayer up and make two graces of it_." For the rest of his life, as the story runs, he did actually employ the two parts of his mutilated prayer as Grace before and Grace after meat respectively. Could there be a finer example of natural thrift in the spiritual world?

An Inverness journalist, Mr. Carruthers, wrote a life of the great poet, Alexander Pope, in which occurs the following curious note respecting the minister of Reay, just mentioned: "The northern Alexander Pope entertained a profound admiration for his illustrious namesake of England; and it is a curious and well-ascertained fact that the simple enthusiastic clergyman, in the summer of 1732, rode on his pony all the way from Caithness to Twickenham, in order to pay the poet a visit. The latter felt his dignity a little touched by the want of the necessary pomp and circumstance with which the minister presumed to approach his domicile; but after the ice of ceremony had in some degree been broken, and their intellects had come in contact, the poet became interested, and a friendly feeling was established between them. Several interviews took place, and the poet presented his good friend and namesake, the minister of Reay, with a copy of the subscription edition of the 'Odyssey' in five volumes quarto."

A grandson of the Reay minister, a Mr. James Campbell of Edinburgh, gave a description to Mr. Carruthers of a snuff-box which the poet had presented to the Rev. Mr. Pope. A series of letters to the _Northern Ensign_, in April, 1883, brought out the information that a Wick gentleman, Mr. Duncan, had in his possession two volumes of de Vertot's _History of the Roman Republic_, bearing an inscription to the effect that they had been presented by the poet of Twickenham to his northern namesake.

It has been suggested that the poet and the minister were distant blood-relations. Mr. Campbell, alluded to above, said that "the two Popes claimed kin." In any case, the friendship of the two men, one living on the shores of the wild Pentland Firth, in sight of the Orkneys, and the other not far "from streaming London's central roar," is pleasant to think of. In 1737, Pope wrote the lines--

"Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep Howl to the roarings of the northern deep,"

adding, in a note, that he refers to "the farthest northern promontory of Scotland, opposite to the Orcades." Perhaps his mind reverted to the burly incumbent of Reay as he penned the note.

ROB DONN.

The little township of Reay is less famous for the Rev. Mr. Pope's incumbency than for the fact of Rob Donn, the satirical Gaelic bard, being a native of the district. The author of the _Dunciad_ is the greatest satirist in British Literature; Rob Donn is supreme among Gaelic bards for the sharpness of his tongue and his clever way of showing up his contemporaries to ridicule. He was in the habit of giving praise to people in order to make his satire more biting. Praise on his tongue was compared to oil on the edge of a razor: the cut was all the deeper. Rob, although a master of language, was unable to read or write, so that though he "lisped in numbers"--he began to compose at the age of three--he could not say, like Pope:

"Why did I _write_? What sin to me unknown _Dipt me in ink_, my parents' or my own?"

Blackie speaks thus of him: "Rob Donn, according to all accounts, though outwardly of such fair respectability that he attained an honour, unknown to Robert Burns, of acting as an elder of the kirk, was not always so chaste in his words as he might seem to be in his deeds; he took his plash as a poet, and not always in the clearest waters; besides, he had a terrible lash at his command, which he could wield with an effect at times that paid little respect to the bounds set in such matters by Christian charity, or even by social politeness. The consequence has been that much of the wit and humour of his pieces, however telling for its immediate purpose, has lost half of its interest by the disappearance of the persons to whom it referred. These personal allusions also import an additional difficulty into the language which he uses, and cause his productions, however belauded, to be less known amongst Highlanders generally than those of Duncan Ban and Dugald Buchanan. Severe moralists also very properly object to the undue license and occasional coarseness of his verses."[33]

[33] Rob was at one time in the army, for every Mackay has the fighting instinct in him. (Reay is one of the few townships in the North that possess a drill-hall and a military instructor. It is impossible adequately to describe the consternation in the Mackay country at the time of our South African reverses. Everyone was in a fury and it was felt there was urgent need for the Mackays to straighten out matters at the seat of war. It was at this time that the drill-hall was built in Reay. Many of the young men went to the front as volunteers, and if the war had lasted much longer, there would have been few Mackays left in Sutherlandshire.)

REV. MR. MILL OF DUNROSSNESS.

Before concluding the present chapter, I should like to refer briefly to a valuable and amusing book (brought under my notice in Shetland) that furnishes details of the life of Mr. Mill, minister of Dunrossness from 1742 till 1805. Mr. Mill's special talent was his unrivalled power of exorcism: he was a strenuous foe to the devil in every shape and form, and his life was one long battle with the Prince of Darkness. The latter was constantly bringing into play all manner of gins, traps, and wiles to confound the uncompromising clergyman; but, on a calm review of the evidence, one cannot but admit that the devil was far inferior in intelligence to his opponent.

On one occasion, Satan had the effrontery to come into Dunrossness Church and take his seat at the Communion Table. Mr. Mill at once recognised his life-long adversary, and began to speak in all the deep languages, and, last of all, in Gaelic, and that beat him altogether. Satan went off like a flock of "doos" over the heads of the people, many of whom swooned. "As a permanent reminder of the hostility cherished against him by the Arch-Enemy, it was said that Mr. Mill always had the wind in his face. One day he came up to officiate at Sandwick, in the teeth, as usual, of a pretty stiff breeze. An ordinary person would naturally have expected the wind to be on his back on the return journey. But during the service the wind veered round. Mr. Mill's only comment, as he started for home, was, 'It's all he can do.' In one respect, Mr. Mill benefited by the penalty of always having the wind in his face, for on his very numerous sea-journeys he could always secure a favourable breeze _by sitting with his back to the head of the boat_."

The following additional tale from Mr. Mill's biography only brings into more striking relief the resource of the minister in all emergencies. "One day a very respectable gentleman entered the house of a tailor in Channerwick, and ordered a suit of clothes to be made out of cloth which he brought with him. The tailor's delight at having such a fine gentleman for a customer was, however, turned into perplexity and fear as he opened up the cloth and found that the colour kept constantly changing. He at once sent for the minister and laid the matter before him. He was advised to spread a sheet on the floor and cut the cloth upon it, so that none of the clippings should be scattered about the room, and the minister said that he would be present to meet the stranger when the latter called to get the clothes. The day came, and when the stranger entered the house, Mr. Mill stepped forward to meet him. A terrible controversy ensued, and the respectable-looking gentleman was swept out of the house in a cloud of blue, sulphurous flame. It is not recorded if he took the new suit with him. A clue to his identification was furnished by his accidentally striking his foot against the door-step as he departed. The result of the collision was that a mark as of a cloven hoof was imprinted on the stone."