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."



CHAPTER VIII.

METRICAL AND SUPPLEMENTARY.

I. Arrival of the Mail-train at a Highland Station. II. Defoe, the Father of Journalism. III. A Village Toper. IV. A Reverend Hellenist. V. Antigone. VI. Shadows of the Manse. VII. "My Heart's in the Highlands." VIII. Saddell, Kintyre. IX. Springtime in Perthshire. X. Dr. George Macdonald's Creed. XI. Abbotsford. XII. Carlyle. XIII. Shelley. XIV. Picture in an Inn. XV. Rain-storm at Loch Awe. XVI. Kinlochewe. XVII. General Wade. XVIII. Sound of Raasay in December. XIX. Les Neiges d' Antan. XX. The Islands of the Ness. XXI. American Tourist Loquitur. XXII. The Miners. XXIII. In a Country Graveyard. XXIV. No Place like Home.

I.

ARRIVAL OF THE MAIL-TRAIN AT A HIGHLAND STATION.

"Hark! 'tis the twanging horn." So Cowper sang Of the slow post-boy by the flooded Ouse; In different fashion now the great world's news Goes to each nook of Britain. The harangue Of politician; great events that hang In Fortune's hand, with magic speed diffuse From London's centre to the furthest Lews, Their tingling rumour and resounding clang. Daily along yon track of curving steels Comes to this Highland clachan, Watt's machine, Rolling in triumph on its iron wheels, And bringing letter, journal, magazine, To kilted Celts with collies at their heels And frivolous tourists from the putting-green.

II.

DEFOE[34]

(FATHER OF JOURNALISM).

Father of journalists! illustrious liar! Untiring wielder of the nimblest quill That ever shed the stanchless inky rill Upon the virgin whiteness of the quire. What full and varied stores of gold and mire, Magnificence and squalor, good and ill, Prayers, curses, loyalty and treason fill Thy books! But that which children most admire Of all thy hundred volumes, is the one Fated for ever more to charm mankind From the far Orient to the Setting Sun. Prompt-witted Daniel! thou has left behind Upon the Sands of Time, distinctly traced, One footmark that can never be effaced.

[34] Let me here pay a tribute to the marked excellence and literary skill of the newspapers of provincial Scotland. These are very numerous—even Ailsa Craig has a sheet of its own, The Ailsa Craig Banner.

III.

A VILLAGE TOPER.

John loved strong waters and ne'er stirred his feet Abroad in leafy spring or summer's heat, Autumnal breeze or winter's rimy chill, Unsolaced by the nectar of the still. Spirits came always kindly to his lips, And time he measured not by hours but "nips." Teetotalers to him were curse and gall, Grim Banquos at the world's wide festival, Men, whom a weird and fate-ordained bale, Had smitten with the hate of cakes and ale, A soda-water, syphon-squirting crew, Guilty of treason to the revenue: Their lurid language and their unctuous warnings, Their moral-pointings and their tale-adornings, And, worst of all, their shameful waste of ink In signing pledges to abstain from drink, Proved them a witless and a churlish band, Unfit to dwell in any Christian land.

IV.

A REVEREND HELLENIST.

In that old ivied manse exists A scholar, wrinkled, bent, and gray, His student lamp gleams through the mists And twinkles on till break of day.

This sage is wedded to his books, And Sultan-like his harem's full, He dotes upon them in their nooks With love and joy that never cool.

No wonder that his back is bent, Or that his eye has mystic glows, He pores on pages redolent Of love and love's undying rose.

No earthly maiden, fresh and sweet, Could please his fancy half so well As a Greek nymph with twinkling feet Skipping in some Arcadian dell.

V.

ANTIGONE

(READ IN A HIGHLAND MANSE).

A form of beauty blent with hardihood, Majestic as Olympus wreathed in snows, What modern pages of romance disclose A radiant maiden of such dauntless mood! Yet, when the tyrant strives with outrage rude The unyielding maid in darkness to enclose, Then, only then, her burning heart outflows In anguished cries of love, but unsubdued By baser throbbings. Ah! that nuptial hymn Unsung! that bond in death! All men agree To crown thee in that chamber dark and dim With love's immortal wreath, Antigone. Since love and duty in thy death combine, An immortality of praise is thine.

VI.

SHADOWS OF THE MANSE.

I.

Lo! we have him of shaven face And curls of long and lustrous hair, Who breathes an atmosphere of grace And has a wondrous gift in prayer. You'd ne'er suspect to see him there, Shaking his head in solemn guise, The college life of deil-may-care Diversion that behind him lies.

II.

And then the little starveling pope Who strives to make his sermons new By stringing florid scraps of hope And faith and love to dazzle you: From Stopford Brooke a phrase or two, A gleaming line from Arnold's page, Whole screeds of Browning and a few Stolen thunders from the Chelsea sage.

III.

Perhaps the most diverting wight Is he who sees in Holy Writ Old Jewish fables gross and trite To semblance of a system knit— Fables for modern taste unfit, Until he cleans the dross away And shows the tiny little bit Of gold that gleams amid the clay.

IV.

But worst of all is he who jests, Or tries to jest, in pulpit gown, Lord, save us from such holy pests Who so unseemly act the clown And pull the tabernacle down To something worse than pantomime: On all such zanies let us frown And scourge them both in prose and rhyme.

VII.

"MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS."

Puzzling over musty tomes, What a life to lead, While each gay companion roams Where his fancies lead!

One beside a shady pool Sweeps the wave for hours, Comes home with his basket full, When the evening lowers.

Some more energetic wights Leave the level land, Mountaineer on dizzy heights, Alpenstock in hand.

Others boat in sunny bays Where bright sands are seen Glimmering amid a maze Of tangled flowers marine.

Luck to all is what I wish With a meed of fun, I'll row, mountaineer, and fish, When your sports are done.

VIII.

SADDELL

(KINTYRE).

Fresh gusts of wind ripple the ocean's face, And the green slopes, after the night's soft rain, Glitter beneath the blue.

Most glorious are the sea-descending glens, Vivid with countless ferns, and with the blaze Of sun-enamoured broom.

The dark, tip-tilted rocks of cruel mood, Show a stern beauty through the creamy foam That flecks their rugged flanks.

See, from this hill-top, how the blazing Sound Is marked by moving shadows of the clouds That skim aloft in air.

Through the clear radiance of the freshened morn, The eye can see the far farm-windows gleam Up on the Arran hills.

IX.

SPRINGTIME IN PERTHSHIRE.

Returning Springtime fills the woods with song— The ring-dove, sick for love, is cooing sweet; The lark, scorning the daisies, soars to greet The sun, while the brown swarms of bees among The flowery meadows skim in haste along. Once more the young year glories in the feat Of driving winter off with vernal heat And tepid sap luxuriantly strong. Winter has drawn aloof his snowy powers To the high peaks that domineer the plain, And, like a vanquished leader, grimly lowers, From a safe distance, on the victor's reign. E'er many months have passed, his arrowy showers And gusty cohorts will descend again.

X.

DR. GEORGE MACDONALD'S CREED[35]

(WRITTEN AT CULLEN).

God will not suffer that a single one Of His own creatures, in His image made, Should die, and in irrevocable shade Lie evermore—neglected and undone. It is not thus a father treats his son, And those whose folly credits it, degrade God's love and fatherhood, that never fade, By lies as base as devils ever spun. Man's love is but a pale reflex of God's, And God is love, and never will condemn Beyond remission—though He school with rods— His children, but will one day comfort them. Dives will have his drink at last, and stand Among the faithful ones at God's right hand.

[35] Reprinted (by kind permission) from the Scotsman.

XI.

ABBOTSFORD.

"Dryden and Scott, men of a giant seed!" So said I to myself, gazing upon The pictured countenance of Glorious John, In Abbotsford, hard by the storied Tweed. These twain were brothers, kin in mind and deed: Old England never had a brawnier son Than Dryden; and in fervid Scotland none Better than Scott exemplified the breed. After five centuries of blood and hate, Britain is one leal land from north to south, From gusty Thurso to St. Michael's Mount, I therefore, Scot and Briton, am elate To think that from Sir Walter's golden mouth Dryden's career received the fit account.

XII.

CARLYLE

(AT ECCLEFECHAN).

The ploughman in the loamy furrow sings, The sailor whistles as he reefs the sail, Blithe is the smith as the blows fall like hail From his huge hammer, and the stithy rings. Work is the sole and sovereign balm that brings Peace to the torpid soul when doubts assail, And sickening pleasures are of no avail To lull the torture of affliction's stings. Give me the work I love, the work I feel God in His Heaven has willed that I should do, And you may offer the whole commonweal, Lands, mansions, jewels, gold, and temples too, Vainly to me. By strenuous work alone Man mounts on Jacob's ladder to God's throne.

XIII.

SHELLEY.[36]

'Twas but a passing visit that he paid To the gross air of earth, this mystic seer, The tyrannies of sense were too severe For one of clay more fine than Adam's made. The inhumanity of man, the trade Of coining gold from the serf's groan and tear, The galling fetters of religious fear, And vain ecclesiastic masquerade Tortured his gentle soul, and made his life One bitter struggle with the powers that be: Yet not in vain he lived; his manful strife With all the deadening despotisms we see Will ring along the centuries, until Good has her final triumph over ill.

[36] Suggested by a copy of his poems in a West Highland bookcase.

XIV.

PICTURE IN AN INN.

A wood of pines through which the setting sun Pours from the western sky a parting flame, Beside the shore, a church called by the name Of some old saint whose pious race was run Long ere schismatic Luther had begun To work the Pope and his disciples shame. In earnest-seeming talk, a knight and dame Sit in a painted galley, rowed by one Whose back is to the setting orb of day. The soldier and his mate, their faces lit With all love's animation and the ray Of the down-lapsing globe of crimson, sit Together in the gilded vessel's prow, And there will sit for evermore, as now.

XV.

RAIN-STORM AT LOCH AWE.

The topmost mountain-snows are melting fast, See, how the swollen waters hurry down In perpendicular runnels from the crown Of every wreathed hill. The train has past Beside a dark stream into which are cast A hundred huddling rills whose foam is brown With pilfered soil. No dweller in a town Ever beheld such manifold and vast Torrents of roaring water. Each small isle Spaced on the loch, glooms through the hanging haze Like a dream-picture, and for many a mile Beneath those clouds that lean upon the braes Encompassing Loch Awe, the watery plain Is pricked with million lances of the rain.

XVI.

KINLOCHEWE.

The mist, retreating, gems the leaves with dew, Soft blows the breeze along the fragrant meads, A little brawling burn runs through the reeds And ripples away under the cloudless blue. I never saw the world so fair to view, For Spring has riven old Winter's funeral weeds And given new sap and vigour to the seeds That lay inanimate the cold months through. Old man! with jaded limbs and wrinkled brow, That walkest feebly in this lenient sun Like a day-dream, thy life is winter now. But life and death in ceaseless cycles run, And tireless Time and Heaven have in store For thee a myriad resurrections more.

XVII.

GENERAL WADE.

Houses are fewer here than milestones are: We stand a thousand feet aloft in air Upon a bouldered hillside stern and bare, Down which the roadway serpentines afar. There are no clouds in the wide blue to mar The passage of the sun's imperial glare Over a dreary-stretching landscape, where Rough winds hold riot all the calendar. Who that has footed o'er these firm-knit paths But lauds the men whose strenuous axe and spade Drove roads through the wild glens and hilly straths Under the generalship of tireless Wade! On the safe tracks behind them, commerce came The unruly spirit of the Celt to tame.

XVIII.

THE SOUND OF RAASAY IN DECEMBER.

A snowy gust is whirling down the strait, Raasay is gleaming ghostly to the sight, And, robed in lawn, from sea to topmost height Skye and her lordly mountains stand in state. Ever from heaven falls the silent weight Of wavering flakes that dim the stars of night. Our gallant little boat with all the might Of the wild-hissing surges holds debate, Plunging and struggling, till at last we see A spacious haven, sudden and serene And, high aloft, the twinkle of Portree. At once the winds are hushed, the moon is seen To free her face from cloudy drift, and fill With silver light the clefts of Essie Hill.

XIX.

LES NEIGES D'ANTAN.

I.

Where is Macfee, that valiant preacher, Gifted with voice, so harsh and loud, Aye, louder and harsher than any screecher Of birds that sail on the black storm-cloud? And his beadle John, with back so bowed, Where is he that had never a peer? Is he too rolled in his mortal shroud? But where are the snows of yester-year?

II.

Donald the Gay, that steered his steamer Many a year through the Sound of Mull, He that was never a Celtic dreamer, But a captain of captains masterful: O Death, thou madest the world more dull When you nailed him down in his narrow bier, And sent his ghost into Charon's hull; But where are the snows of yester-year?

III.

Duncan, the bard of rocky Staffin, Away in the north of rainy Skye: Has he given over his rimes and daffin', In the mould of the bleak kirkyard to lie? His cot was built where the sea-gulls fly, And his misty isle to his soul was dear; Ere his song is finished, the bard must die; But where are the snows of yester-year?

IV.

And Dougal, who carried King Edward's mails Every day o'er the moor and heather, Scorning the chill of the winter gales, And the ten-mile walk in the sultry weather: Has he too come to the end of his tether And gone to the ghosts with all his gear, His whistle, his satchel and strap of leather? But where are the snows of yester-year?

V.

Prince, they have gone from the regions that knew them, Gone at the summons that none can resist, Praise and every honour be to them, They did their best and they will be missed. We, too, shall soon be erased from the list Of workers below in this mortal sphere, And be no more to those that exist Than the vanished snows of yester-year.

XX.

THE ISLANDS OF THE NESS.

A fairyland of trees and leafy bowers Where one may sit and dream the hours away, Or 'mid the devious walks and alleys stray, While perfume rises from a world of flowers, The girdling river, swollen with upland showers, Sends rippling round to every creek and bay The vagrant branches of his water-way; Then gathering up his current's parted powers, Swiftly-majestic in a broadening bed, He glistens on by many a chiming spire, And past the castle's pennoned turrets red, Till he attain the goal of his desire, And into the salt sea exulting throws His subsidy of rains and melted snows.

XXI.

AMERICAN TOURIST LOQUITUR

(AT BERRIEDALE, CAITHNESS).

If I had wealth like Vanderbilt Or some such millionaire, I'd live in Scotland, don a kilt, And pay to prove my forbears spilt Their blood in forays there.

I'd buy a picturesque estate Beside the ocean's flow, With knolls of heather at my gate, And pine-clad hills to dominate, The ferny dells below.

I'd be a father to the folk That laboured on the soil, With old and young I'd crack my joke, Drink with them in their thirst, and smoke The pipe that lightens toil.

For hens I'd have a special run, For ducks a special pool, My calves should frolic in the sun, My sheep should be surpassed by none Whose backs are clothed with wool.

Although I'm not a Walton quite, Betweenwhiles I should try To lure the finny tribe to bite (At the right time, in the right light,) My simulated fly.

When winter heaped his rattling hail High on the window sill, With pipe and wassail, rime and tale, I'd never miss the nightingale Or cuckoo on the hill.

Nay, musing by the ingle-lowe With summer in my brain, I'd cloth with leaves the frozen bough And all the ice-bound brooks endow With tinkling life again.[37]

[37] Berriedale, which moved the American to commemorative song, is on the Caithness shore, and there the Duke of Portland has one of his numerous residences. The Duke's seat is high up on the hills and behind it is a mountain of grim aspect which serves for a deer-forest. At Berriedale, the road traversed by the coach is simply appalling: boards marked Dangerous forewarn all wheel-men that risks cannot be taken with impunity. An honest descent can be easily coped with, but here the road to the glen is not merely steep, it is as lacking in straightforwardness as the links of Forth. Once down at the level of the village, the breeze no longer blows fresh and chilly, but subsides into a quiet air, grateful with the odour of flowers. Passengers are requested to walk up the corresponding hill to a level equal to the height of the road before the interruption of the terrible Berriedale chasm. When the ascent is reached, one has a view of unsurpassed splendour. The wooded Wye, which Wordsworth sang so rapturously and which he saw with his mind's eye in the dinsome town, has no landscape to compare in grandeur and beauty with the country round Berriedale, viewed from this eminence. Hills of richest green, diversified with purple heather; a back-ground of wild bog and mountain; blue sea; and great banks of cloud shepherded over the heights by the mighty winds.

XXII.

THE MINERS.

The afternoon is cool and calm, Near by flashes the mighty sea, Inland rise green, dewy hills, Crowned with eye-bewitching trees.

Suddenly the eye is amazed and terrified, A hideous procession sordid and grimy Of men and boys, slaves of the coal-pit, Is seen on the road, shaming the daylight.

All the day long they work in the darkness, Far from the songs of the birds and the sunshine, Now they return to their sordid villages, Ill-smelling rows of comfortless cottages.

The rich and dainty ladies of fashion Stand aloof from these swart coal-hewers, Are ready to swoon as the air is poisoned With odours of subterranean foulness.

Coarse of look, and of speech far coarser! Laughter loud with no merriment in it! No more soul than the beasts that perish! These are the men despised for their toiling.

XXIII.

IN A COUNTRY GRAVEYARD.[38]

Man dreads the tomb, but dreads oblivion more; He fears, when death has loosed the load of years, His name shall cease to sound in mortal ears, And, in the dusty darkness, all be o'er. Some o'er the scrolls of ample science pore, Tome after tome the nimble authors write, And gain a meed of glory: soon the night Comes: the author with his laurel disappears, The painting fades, the marble busts decay, The kingly structures fall in ruin down, Devouring Time consumes the artist's prize, The centuries like lightning pass away, Or hurrying billows: emperor and clown Sink with the myriads in impartial clay.

[38] Suggested by a French poem of Monsieur Desessarts, entitled Se Survivre.

XXIV.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

Where'er these wandering footsteps lead me to, Peak-dominated glen, hill where the sheep Graze in the sun, mountains that ever keep A solemn guard o'er lakes profound and blue, Or undulating tracts of treeless view; No matter if the rain and whirlwind sweep The landscape, or the gladdening sunshine peep Through muffled vapours that the winds undo; Let it be night speckled with myriad fires, Clear dawn, hot noon, or cool of dying day; Be it in cities with their chiming spires, Or country fields with fragrant ricks of hay; Ever the voices of my hearth I hear, And muse on those to me for ever dear.



INDEX

(Chiefly of Proper Names).

Aberdeen, 217

Acharacle, 21, 66

Achnasheen, 11

Ainsworth, Mr., 69

Ajax, 89

Aliens, 53

Alness, 75

Altnacealgach, 38

Anacreon, 181

Anglers, 36

Anecdotes of Commercials, 255-277

Appin, 311

Ardeonaig, 78

Ardersier, 42

Argyll, Duke of, 25

Arnisdale, 190

Arnold, 130

Arpafeelie, 158

Asquith, Mr., 15

Auldearn, 75

Avebury, Lord, 198

Bagpipes, 66

Bain, Professor, 55

Ballads, 99

Banff theorist, 107

Barrie, Mr., 66

Battle of Brunanburh, 131

Beauly, 75

Ben Eay, 22

Ben-na-Ceallich, 28

Bennachie, 329

Ben Screel, 191

Ben Slioch, 22

Beowulf, 131, 246

Beveridge, Dr., 301

Biggar, 98

Biblia abiblia, 109

Blackie, Professor, 19, 56

Books, second-hand, 112

Borders, 96, 99

Boswell, 306, 313

Brahan Seer, 291

Bressay, 221, 229, 230, 233

Broadford, 28, 55

Browning, 306

Buchanan, 61

Bullers of Buchan, 220

Burgess, Mr., 227

Burke, 68

Burns, 82, 144, 308

Burton, 209

Caithness father, a, 254

Captains, 24

Catholics, 153-155

Chairmen, 85

Chartists, 54

Coll, 26, 69

Columbus, 88

Commercials (Chap. VI.), 255-277

Competing School-subjects, 215

Congested Districts Board, 34

Connaught, H.R.H. Duke of, 42

Connington, 119

Corelli, Miss Marie, 44

Cowper, 118

Craignish, 168-9

Crofters' cottages, 29-30

Cromarty, 12

Cullen, 47

Cunningsburgh, 239

Dancing, 21

Dandie Dinmont, 99

Defoe, 112

Depopulation, 71, 189

Dingwall, 44

Dixon, Mr., 76, 278

Doctors, 35

Dodger, an artful, 173

Dominies, insular, 180-1

Dowden, Professor, 124

Drimnin, 167

Dryden, 118

Dunbar, 218

Dungeon lecture, a, 92

Dunvegan, 28, 61, 292

Durness, 11

Educational (Chap. IV.), 180-216

Education Department, 16, 141, 185

Eigg, 26

Emigration, 73-4

Episcopalians, 156-8

Essayists, 106

Established Church, 145

Ethical teaching, 141-3

Fairies, 248, 285

Fair Isle, 220, 250

Faith Mission, 25

Feeding the Hungry, 186, 194

Fernaig MS., 197

Fishing season, 253

Fishwives, 249

Fladibister, 239

Fort George, 42

Foulah, 250

French Literature, 126

Frere, Miss, 39, 40

Gairloch, 278

Gaelic, 17, 86

Geologist, an ordained, 170

Germany, made in, 218

Gibbon, 300

Gigha, 175

Gipsies, 191

Glasgow Fair, 96

Glasgow Herald, quoted, 20, note

Glenelg, 191

Golspie, 192

Grange, 299

Grantown, 13

Greatness, real, 81

Greek, 124

Haaf-words, 246

Halsbury, Lord, 235

Harlaw, 330

Harris, 39

Hector, Red, 320

Hermits, 223

Hobbes, 106

Holyoake, Mr., 60

Homer, 62

Horace, 12, 115

Hotels, 36

Howlers, 209-214

Inspectors, 252

Inveraray, 307

Inverness, 48, 58

Iona, 309

Islay, 79

Isle Ornsay, 191

Jakobsen, Dr., 245

Jamieson, Dr., 103

Johnson, 29, 43, 294, 306

Josephus, 111

Jura, 195

Killin, 78

Kilmartin, 76

Kiltarlity, 75

Kingussie, 326

Kinlochewe, 22

Lanark, 97

Lang, Mr. Andrew, 17, 37

Latin, 204

Lerwick, 221-2

Letter-boats, 299

Lewis, 32, 33

Libraries in schools, 16

Liddesdale, 99

Literature, 83

Lochaber, 332

Lochaline, 168

Lochbuie, 304

Loch Broom, 286

Loch Eck, 79

Loch Fyne, 317

Loch Hourn, 190

Lochmaddy, 36, 40

Loch Maree, 283

Loch Ranza, 196

Loubet, M., 118

Mallaig, 32

Mary, the maid of the inn, 258

Martin, Sir Theodore, 119

Men of Skye, 150

Military, 42

Mill, Rev. Mr., 338-9

Miller, an ordained, 172

Milton, 154

Miners, 49, 51, 52

Mod, the, 18

Model minister, a, 170

Moderates, the, 144-5

Moon, the, 77

M.P.'s, 69

Moray Firth, 46

Morar, 154

Morley, Lord, 118

Muck, 267

Munro, Dr. Neil, 44, 318

Murray, Sir James, 103

Music, 65-67, 141

Macallisters, etc., 318

Macbain, Dr., 58

M'Cheyne, 90

Macdonald, Dr. George, 48

Macdonald's gratitude, 313

Macdonald, Rev. Mr., 146

M'Gregors, the, 91

Macivors, 318

Mackays, the, 337

Macleod, 61

Nicholson, Sheriff, 185

Night Thoughts, 64

Norse blood, 183, 225

"North, Christopher," 107, 167

Olaf and his bride, 279

Old Parochials, 200

Ossian, 326-339

Ovid, 300

Paisley, 89

Parish Councils, 187

Paul, St., 132

Peat-reek, 29

Peden, the prophet, 292

Peterhead, 220

Phillimore, Professor, 206, note

Pigmentation, 133

Plymouth Brethren, 162-5

Poetry (Chap. VIII.), 340-367

Policemen, 23

Poolewe, 67, 76

Pope, 115, 119, 123, 127-9

Pope, Rev. Alexander, 334-6

Portknockie, 47

Portree, 27, 76

Portsoy, 46, 47

Postmen, 28

Prince Charlie, 44

Quarff, 234

Raasay, 26

Ramsay, Sir William, 207

Rasmie's Buedie, 227

Rats, 37

Reay, 333-6

"Red-riding Hood," 142

Religious books, 18

Rob Don, 337

Robertson, Mr. J. M., 41

"Rob Roy," 183

Romance and Augustanism, 127

Rosebery, Lord, 297

Rosehearty, 49

Rothes, 325

Royal Engineers, 69

Ruskin, 177

Russian merchant, a, 254

Sabbath, the, 148

Saddell, 92

St. Kilda, 297

Salen, 90

Sandwick, 246

Saxon and Celt, 41, 131

Scalloway, 62

School Boards, 184

Science and Literature, 198

Scotch Dialect, 103

Scott, 84, 107, 183, 199, 312, 315

Sea-sickness, 31

Sermons in metre, 159-161

Session Records, 44

Shakespeare's Sonnets, 119

Shaws and Grants, 323

Shetlands (Chap. V.), 217-254

Sidlaws, 193

Skye, 28, 61

Sound of Sleat, 26

Spencer, 229

Spenser, 128

Staffin, 66

Stewart, Dugald, 208

Stornoway, 32-4

Strachur, 79

Suetonius, 113

Surprises, 195

Sutherland, Duchess of, 33

Taisch, 290

Tarbolton, 102

Tannahill, 54, 90

Tea-drinking, 39

Tee-names, 47

Teeth, 40

Tennyson, 130

Tiree, 301

"Tom Eunan," 322

Trossachs, 315

Truants, 196

Ullapool, 290

Village halls, 75

Virgil, 24, 219

Ward, Mrs. H., 182

War Office, 45

Wason, Mr. C., 250

Watson, Mr. William, 118, 218

Weaving, 53

Weir, Mr. Galloway, 15, 70

Whalsay, 193

Whiting Bay, 197

Wordsworth, 21, 128, 309

Xenophon, 122

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