Chapter V: Part 5

But my chief delight here is my friend, Mr M'Ian. I know that I described him when I first saw him in his own house; but knowing him better now, as a matter of course I can describe him better. He would strike one with a sense of strangeness in a city, and among men of the present generation; but here he creates no surprise--he is a natural product of the region, like the red heather, or the bed of the dried torrent. He is master of legendary lore. He knows the history of every considerable family in the island; he circulates like sap through every genealogical tree; he is an enthusiast in Gaelic poetry, and is fond of reciting compositions of native bards, his eyes lighted up, and his tongue moving glibly over the rugged clots of consonants. He has a servant cunning upon the pipes; and, dwelling there this summer, I heard Ronald wandering near the house, solacing himself with their music: now a plaintive love-song, now a coronach for chieftain borne to his grave, now a battle march, the notes of which, melancholy and monotonous at first, would soar into a higher strain, and then hurry and madden as if beating time to the footsteps of the charging clan. I am the fool of association; and the tree under which a king has rested, the stone on which a banner was planted on the morning of some victorious or disastrous day, the house in which some great man first saw the light, are to me the sacredest things. This slight, gray, keen-eyed man--the scabbard sorely frayed now, the blade sharp and bright as ever--gives me a thrill like an old coin with its half-obliterated effigy, a Druid stone on a moor, a stain of blood on the floor of a palace. He stands before me a living figure, and history groups itself behind by way of background. He sits at the same board with me, and yet he lifted Moore at Corunna, and saw the gallant dying eyes flash up with their last pleasure when the Highlanders charged past. He lay down to sleep in the light of Wellington's watch-fires in the gorges of the Pyrenees; around him roared the death-thunders of Waterloo. There is a certain awfulness about very old men; they are amongst us, but not of us. They crop out of the living soil and herbage of to-day, like rocky strata bearing marks of the glacier or the wave. Their roots strike deeper than ours, and they draw sustenance from an earlier layer of soil. They are lonely amongst the young; they cannot form new friendships, and are willing to be gone. They feel the "sublime attractions of the grave;" for the soil of churchyards once flashed kind eyes on them, heard with them the chimes at midnight, sang and clashed the brimming goblet with them; and the present Tom and Harry are as nothing to the Tom and Harry that swaggered about and toasted the reigning belles seventy years ago. We are accustomed to lament the shortness of life; but it is wonderful how long it is notwithstanding. Often a single life, like a summer twilight, connects two historic days. Count back four lives, and King Charles is kneeling on the scaffold at Whitehall. To hear M'Ian speak, one could not help thinking in this way. In a short run across the mainland with him this summer, we reached Culloden Moor. The old gentleman with a mournful air--for he is a great Jacobite, and wears the Prince's hair in a ring--pointed out the burial-grounds of the clans. Struck with his manner, I inquired how he came to know their red resting-places. As if hurt, he drew himself up, laid his hand on my shoulder, saying, "Those who put them in told me." Heavens, how a century and odd years collapsed, and the bloody field--the battle-smoke not yet cleared away, and where Cumberland's artillery told the clansmen sleeping in thickest swathes--unrolled itself from the horizon down to my very feet! For a whole evening he will sit and speak of his London life; and I cannot help contrasting the young officer, who trod Bond Street with powder in his hair at the end of last century, with the old man living in the shadow of Blaavin now.

[Sidenote: Skye stories.]

Dwellers in cities have occasionally seen a house that has the reputation of being haunted, and heard a ghost story told. City people laugh when these stories are told, even although the blood should run chill the while. But in Skye one is steeped in a ghostly atmosphere; men walk about here gifted with the second sight. There has been something weird and uncanny about the island for some centuries. Douglas, on the morning of Otterbourne, according to the ballad, was shaken with superstitious fears:--

"But I hae dream'd a dreary dream--
Beyond the Isle of Skye,
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I."

Then the whole country is full of stories of the Norwegian times and earlier--stories it might be worth Dr Dasent's while to take note of, should he ever visit the Hebrides. Skye, more particularly, is haunted of legends. It is as full of noises as Prospero's Island. One such legend, concerning Ossian and his poems, struck me a good deal. Near Mr M'Ian's place is a ruined castle, a mere hollow shell of a building, Dunscaich by name, built in Fingalian days by the chieftain Cuchullin, and so called by him in honour of his wife. The ruin stands on a rocky headland bearded by gray-green lichens. It is quite desolate, and but seldom visited. The only sounds heard there are the whistle of the salt breeze, the bleat of a strayed sheep, the cry of wheeling sea-birds. M'Ian and myself sat one summer day on the ruined stair. Loch Eishart lay calm and bright beneath, the blue expanse broken only by a creeping sail. Across the Loch rose the great red hill, in the shadow of which Boswell got drunk, on the top of which is perched the Scandinavian woman's cairn; and out of the bare heaven, down on the crests of the Cuchullins, flowed a great white vapour which gathered in the sunlight in mighty fleece on fleece. The old gentleman was the narrator, and the legend goes as follows:--The castle was built by Cuchullin and his Fingalians in a single night. The chieftain had many retainers, was a great hunter, and terrible in war. With his own arm he broke battalions; and every night at feast the minstrel Ossian sang his exploits. Ossian, on one occasion, wandering among the hills, was attracted by strains of music which seemed to issue from a round green knoll on which the sun shone pleasantly. He sat clown to listen, and was lulled asleep by the melody. He had no sooner fallen asleep than the knoll opened, and he beheld the under-world of the fairies. That afternoon and night he spent in revelry, and in the morning he was allowed to return. Again the music sounded, again the senses of the minstrel were steeped in forgetfulness; and on the sunny knoll he awoke, a gray-haired man, for into one short afternoon and evening had been crowded a hundred of our human years. In his absence the world had been entirely changed, the Fingalians were extinct, and the dwarfish race whom we now call men were possessors of the country. Longing for companionship, and weary of singing his songs to the earless rocks and sea waves, Ossian married the daughter of a shepherd, and in process of time a little girl was born to him. Years passed on, his wife died, and his daughter, woman grown now, married a pious man--for the people were Christianised by this time--called, from his love of psalmody, Peter of the Psalms. Ossian, blind with age, and bearded like the cliff yonder, went to reside with his daughter and her husband. Peter was engaged all day in hunting, and when he came home at evening and the lamp was lighted, Ossian, sitting in a warm corner, was wont to recite the wonderful songs of his youth, and to celebrate the mighty battles and hunting feats of the big-boned Fingalians--and in these songs Cuchullin stood with his terrible spear upraised, and his beautiful wife sat amid her maids plying the distaff. To these songs Peter of the Psalms gave attentive ear, and, being something of a penman, carefully inscribed them in a book. One day Peter had been more than usually successful in the chase, and brought home on his shoulders the carcass of a huge stag. Of this stag a leg was dressed for supper, and when it was picked bare, Peter triumphantly inquired of Ossian, "In the Fingalian days you sing about, killed you ever a stag so large as this one?" Ossian balanced the bone in his hand, then sniffing intense disdain, replied, "This bone, big as you think it, could be dropped into the hollow of a Fingalian blackbird's leg." Peter of the Psalms, enraged at what he considered an unconscionable crammer on the part of his father-in-law, started up, swearing that he would not peril his soul by preserving any more of his lying songs, and flung the volume in the fire: but his wife darted forward and snatched it up, half-charred, from the embers. At this conduct on the part of Peter, Ossian groaned in spirit and wished to die, that he might be saved from the envies and stupidities of the little people whose minds were as stunted as their bodies. When he went to bed he implored his ancient gods--for he was a sad heathen, and considered psalm-singing no better than the howling of dogs--to resuscitate, if but for one hour, the hounds, the stags, and the blackbirds of his youth, that he might confound and astonish the unbelieving Peter. His prayers done, he fell on slumber, and just before dawn a weight upon his breast awoke him. He put forth his hands and stroked a shaggy hide. Ossian's prayers were answered, for there, upon his breast, in the dark of the morning, was couched his favourite hound. He spoke to it, called it by name, and the faithful creature whimpered and licked his hands and face. Swiftly he got up and called his little grandson, and they went out with the hound. When they came to the top of a little eminence, Ossian said to the child, "Put your fingers in your ears, little one, else I will make you deaf for life." The boy put his fingers in his ears, and then Ossian whistled so loud that the whole sky rang as if it had been the roof of a cave. He then asked the child if he saw anything. "Oh, such large deer!" said the child. "But a small herd by the trampling of it," said Ossian; "we will let that herd pass." Presently the child called out, "Oh, such large deer!" Ossian bent his ear to the ground to catch the sound of their coming, and then, as if satisfied, he let slip the hound, who speedily overtook and tore down seven of the fattest. When the animals were skinned and dressed, Ossian groped his way toward a large lake, in the centre of which grew a wonderful bunch of rushes. He waded into the lake, tore up the rushes, and brought to light the great Fingalian kettle, which had lain there for more than a century. Returning to his quarry, a fire was kindled, the kettle containing the seven carcasses was placed thereupon; and soon a most savoury smell, like a general letter of invitation, flew abroad on all the winds. When the animals were stewed after the approved fashion of his ancestors, Ossian sat down to his repast. Now as, since his sojourn with the fairies, and the extermination of the Fingalians, he had never enjoyed a sufficient meal, it was his custom to gather up the superfluous folds of his stomach by wooden splints, nine in number. As he now fed and expanded, splint after splint was thrown away, as button after button burst on the jacket of the feasting boy in the story-book, till at last, when the kettle was emptied, he lay down on the grass perfectly satisfied, and silent as the ocean when the tide is full. Recovering himself, he gathered all the bones together--set fire to them, and the smoke which ascended made the roof of the firmament as black as the roof of the turf-hut at home. "Little one," then said Ossian, "go up to the knoll and tell me if you see anything." "A great bird is flying hither," said the child; and immediately the great Fingalian blackbird alighted at the feet of Ossian, who at once caught and throttled it. The fowl was carried home, and was in the evening dressed for supper. After it was devoured, Ossian called for the stag's thigh-bone which had been the original cause of quarrel, and before the face of the astonished and convicted Peter of the Psalms, dropped it into the hollow of the blackbird's leg. Ossian died on the night of his triumph, and the only record of his songs is the volume which Peter in his rage threw into the fire, and from which, when half-consumed, it was rescued by his wife.

"But," said I, when the old gentleman had finished his story, "how came it that the big-boned Fingalians were extirpated during the hundred years that Ossian was asleep amongst the fairies?"

"Well," said the old gentleman, "a woman was the cause of that, just as a woman is the cause of most of the other misfortunes that happen in the world. I told you that this castle was built by Cuchullin, and that he and his wife lived in it. Now tallest, bravest, strongest, handsomest of all Cuchullin's warriors was Diarmid, and many a time his sword was red with the blood of the little people who came flocking over here from Ireland in their wicker and skin-covered boats. Now, when Diarmid took off his helmet at feast, there was a fairy mole right in the centre of his forehead, just above the eyes and between his curling locks; and on this beauty spot no woman could look without becoming enamoured of him. One night Cuchullin gave a feast in the castle; the great warrior was invited; and while he sat at meat with his helmet off, Cuchullin's wife saw the star-like mole in the centre of his forehead, and incontinently fell in love with him. Cuchullin discovered his wife's passion, and began secretly to compass the death of Diarmid. He could not slay him openly for fear of his tribe; so he consulted an ancient witch who lived over the hill yonder. Long they consulted, and at last they matured their plans. Now, the Fingalians had a wonderful boar which browsed in Gasken--the green glen which you know leading down to my house--and on the back of this boar there was a poisoned bristle, which, if it pierced the hand of any man, the man would certainly die. No one knew the secret of the bristle save the witch, and the witch told it to Cuchullin. One day, therefore, when the chief and his warriors were sitting on the rocks here about, the conversation was cunningly led to the boar. Cuchullin wagered the magic whistle which was slung around his neck, that the brute was so many handbreadths from the snout to the tip of the tail. Diarmid wagered the shield that he was polishing--the shield which was his mirror in peace, by the aid of which he dressed his curling locks, and with which he was wont to dazzle the eyes of his enemies on a battle day--that it was so many handbreadths less. The warriors heard the dispute and were divided in opinion; some agreeing with Cuchullin, others agreeing with Diarmid. At last it was arranged that Diarmid should go and measure the boar; so he and a number of the warriors went. In a short time they came back laughing and saying that Diarmid had won his wager, that the length of the boar was so many handbreadths, neither more nor less. Cuchullin bit his white lips when he saw them coming; and then he remembered that he had asked them to measure the boar from the snout to the tail, being the way the pile lay; whereas, in order to carry out his design, he ought to have asked them to measure the boar _against_ the pile. When, therefore, he was told that he had lost his wager, he flew into a great rage, maintained that they were all conspiring to deceive him, that the handbreadths he had wagered were the breadths of Diarmid's own hands, and declared that he would not be satisfied until Diarmid would return and measure the boar from the tip of tail to the snout. Diarmid and the rest went away; and when he reached the boar he began measuring it from the tail onward, his friends standing by to see that he was measuring properly, and counting every handbreadth. He had measured half way up the spine, when the poisoned bristle ran into his hand. 'Ah,' he said, and turned pale as if a spear had been driven into his heart. To support himself, he caught two of his friends round the neck, and in their arms he died. Then the weeping warriors raised the beautiful corpse on their shoulders and carried it to the castle, and laid it down near the drawbridge. Cuchullin then came out, and when he saw his best warrior dead he laughed as if a piece of great good fortune had befallen him, and directed that the corpse should be carried into his wife's chamber.

"But Cuchullin had cause to repent soon after. The little black-haired people came swarming over from Ireland in their boats by hundreds and thousands, but Diarmid was not there to oppose them with his spear and shield. Every week a battle was fought, and the little people began to prevail; and by the time that Ossian made his escape from the fairies, every Fingalian, with the exception of two, slept in their big graves--and at times the peat digger comes upon their mighty bones when he is digging in the morasses."

"And the two exceptions?" said I.

"Why, that's another story," said M'Ian, "and I getting tired of legends.--Well, if you will have it, the two last Fingalians made their escape from Skye, carrying with them the magic whistle which Cuchullin wore around his neck, and took up their abode in a cave in Ross-shire. Hundreds of years after a man went into that cave, and in the half twilight of the place saw the whistle on the floor, and lifted it up. He saw it was of the strangest workmanship, and putting it to his lips he blew it. He had never heard a whistle sound so loudly and yet so sweetly. He blew it a second time, and then he heard a voice, 'Well done, little man blow; the whistle a third time;' and turning to the place from which the sound proceeded, he saw a great rock like a man leaning on his elbow and looking up at him. 'Blow it the third time, little man, and relieve us from our bondage!' What between the voice, and the strange human-looking rock, the man got so terrified that he dropped the whistle on the floor of the cave, where it was smashed into a thousand pieces, and ran out into the daylight. He told his story; and when the cave was again visited, neither he nor his companions could see any trace of the broken whistle on the floor, nor could they discover any rock which resembled a weary man leaning on his elbow and looking up."

_A BASKET OF FRAGMENTS._

The month of August is to the year what Sunday is to the week. During that month a section of the working world rests. _Bradshaw_ is consulted, portmanteaus are packed, knapsacks are strapped on, steamboats and railway carriages are crammed, and from Calais to Venice the tourist saunters and looks about him. It is absolutely necessary that the Briton should have, each year, one month's cessation from accustomed labour. He works hard, puts money in his purse, and it is his whim, when August comes, by way of recreation, to stalk deer on Highland corries, to kill salmon in Norwegian fiords, to stand on the summit of Mont Blanc, and to perambulate the pavements of Madrid, Naples, and St Petersburg. To rush over the world during vacation is a thing on which the respectable Briton sets his heart. To remain at home is to lose caste and self-respect. People do not care one rush for the Rhine; but that sacred stream they must behold each year or die. Of all the deities Fashion has the most zealous votaries. No one can boast a more extensive martyrology. Her worshippers are terribly sincere, and many a secret penance do they undergo, and many a flagellation do they inflict upon themselves in private.

[Sidenote: Vacation in Skye.]

Early in the month in which English tourists descend on the Continent in a shower of gold, it has been my custom, for several years back, to seek refuge in the Hebrides. I love Loch Snizort better than the Mediterranean, and consider Duntulme more impressive than the Drachenfels. I have never seen the Alps, but the Cuchullins content me. Haco interests me more than Charlemagne. I confess to a strong affection for those remote regions. Jaded and nervous with eleven months' labour or disappointment, there will a man find the medicine of silence and repose. Pleasant, after poring over books, to watch the cormorant at early morning flying with outstretched neck over the bright frith; pleasant, lying in some sunny hollow at noon, to hear the sheep bleating above; pleasant at evening to listen to wild stories of the isles told by the peat-fire; and pleasantest of all, lying awake at midnight, to catch, muffled by distance, the thunder of the northern sea, and to think of all the ears the sound has filled. In Skye one is free of one's century; the present wheels away into silence and remoteness; you see the ranges of brown shields, and hear the shoutings of the Bare Sarks.

The benefit to be derived from vacation is a mental benefit mainly. A man does not require change of air so much as change of scene. It is well that he should for a space breathe another mental atmosphere--it is better that he should get release from the familiar cares that, like swallows, build and bring forth under the eaves of his mind, and which are continually jerking and twittering about there. New air for the lungs, new objects for the eye, new ideas for the brain--these a vacation should always bring a man; and these are to be found in Skye rather than in places more remote. In Skye the Londoner is visited with a stranger sense of foreignness than in Holland or in Italy. The island has not yet, to any considerable extent, been overrun by the tourist. To visit Skye is to make a progress into "the dark backward and abysm of time." You turn your back on the present and walk into antiquity. You see everything in the light of Ossian, as in the light of a mournful sunset. With a Norse murmur the blue Lochs come running in. The Canongate of Edinburgh is Scottish history in stone and lime; but in Skye you stumble on matters older still. Everything about the traveller is remote and strange. You hear a foreign language; you are surrounded by Macleods, Macdonalds, and Nicolsons; you come on gray stones standing upright on the moor--marking the site of a battle, or the burial-place of a chief. You listen to traditions of ancient skirmishes; you sit on ruins of ancient date, in which Ossian might have sung. The Loch yonder was darkened by the banner of King Haco. Prince Charles wandered over this heath, or slept in that cave. The country is thinly peopled, and its solitude is felt as a burden. The precipices of the Storr lower grandly over the sea; the eagle has yet its eyrie on the ledges of the Cuchullins. The sound of the sea is continually in your ears; the silent armies of mists and vapours perpetually deploy; the wind is gusty on the moor; and ever and anon the jags of the hills are obscured by swirls of fiercely-blown rain. [Sidenote: Spiritual atmosphere of Skye.] And more than all, the island is pervaded by a subtle spiritual atmosphere. It is as strange to the mind as it is to the eye. Old songs and traditions are the spiritual analogues of old castles and burying-places--and old songs and traditions you have in abundance. There is a smell of the sea in the material air; and there is a ghostly something in the air of the imagination. There are prophesying voices amongst the hills of an evening. The raven that flits across your path is a weird thing--mayhap by the spell of some strong enchanter, a human soul is balefully imprisoned in the hearse-like carcass. You hear the stream, and the voice of the kelpie in it. You breathe again the air of old story-books; but they are northern, not eastern ones. To what better place, then, can the tired man go? There he will find refreshment and repose. There the wind blows out on him from another century. The Sahara itself is not a greater contrast from the London street than is the Skye wilderness.

The chain of islands on the western coast of Scotland, extending from Bute in the throat of the Clyde, beloved of invalids, onward to St Kilda, looking through a cloud of gannets toward the polar night, was originally an appanage of the crown of Norway. [Sidenote: The Norse element in Skye.] In the dawn of history there is a noise of Norsemen around the islands, as there is to-day a noise of sea-birds. There fought, as old sagas tell, Anund, the stanchest warrior that ever did battle on wooden leg. _Wood-foot_ he was called by his followers. When he was fighting his hardest, his men used to shove toward him a block of wood, and resting his maimed limb on that, he laid about him right manfully. From the islands also sailed Helgi, half-pagan, half-Christian. Helgi was much mixed in his faith; he was a good Christian in time of peace, but the aid of Thor he was always certain to invoke when he sailed on some dangerous expedition, or when he entered into battle. Old Norwegian castles, perched on the bold Skye headlands, yet moulder in hearing of the surge. The sea-rovers come no longer in their dark galleys, but hill and dale wear ancient names that sigh to the Norway pine. The inhabitant of Mull or Skye perusing the "Burnt Njal," is struck most of all by the names of localities--because they are almost identical with the names of localities in his own neighbourhood. The Skye headlands of Trotternish, Greshornish, and Vaternish, look northward to Norway headlands that wear the same or similar names. Professor Munch, of Christiania, states that the names of many of the islands, Arran, Gigha, Mull, Tyree, Skye, Raasay, Lewes, and others, are in their original form Norwegian and not Gaelic. The Hebrides have received a Norse baptism. Situated as these islands are between Norway and Scotland, the Norseman found them convenient stepping-stones, or resting-places, on his way to the richer southern lands. There he erected temporary strongholds, and founded settlements. Doubtless, in course of time, the son of the Norseman looked on the daughter of the Celt, and saw that she was fair, and a mixed race was the result of alliances. To this day in the islands the Norse element is distinctly visible--not only in old castles, the names of places, but in the faces and entire mental build of the people. Claims of pure Scandinavian descent are put forward by many of the old families. Wandering up and down the islands you encounter faces that possess no Celtic characteristics; which carry the imagination to

"Noroway ower the faem;"

people with cool calm blue eyes, and hair yellow as the dawn; who are resolute and persistent, slow in pulse and speech; and who differ from the explosive Celtic element surrounding them as the iron headland differs from the fierce surge that washes it, or a block of marble from the heated palm pressed against it. The Hebrideans are a mixed race; in them the Norseman and the Celt are combined, and here and there is a dash of Spanish blood which makes brown the cheek and darkens the eye. This southern admixture may have come about through old trading relations with the Peninsula--perhaps the wrecked Armada may have had something to do with it. The Highlander of Sir Walter, like the Red Indian of Cooper, is to a large extent an ideal being. But as Uncas does really wear war-paint, wield a tomahawk, scalp his enemies, and, when the time comes, can stoically die, so the Highlander possesses many of the qualities popularly ascribed to him. Scott exaggerated only; he did not invent. He looked with a poet's eye on the district north of the Grampians--a vision keener than any other for what _is_, but which burdens, and supplements, and glorifies--which, in point of fact, puts a nimbus around everything. The Highlander stands alone amongst the British people. For generations his land was shut against civilisation by mountain and forest and intricate pass. While the large drama of Scottish history was being played out in the Lowlands, he was busy in his mists with narrow clan-fights and revenges. [Sidenote: Highland characteristics.] While the southern Scot owed allegiance to the Jameses, he was subject to Lords of the Isles, and to Duncans and Donalds innumerable; while the one thought of Flodden, the other remembered the "sair field of the Harlaw." The Highlander was, and is still so far as circumstances permit, a proud, loving, punctilious being: full of loyalty, careful of social distinction; with a bared head for his chief, a jealous eye for his equal, an armed heel for his inferior. He loved the valley in which he was born, the hills on the horizon of his childhood; his sense of family relationship was strong, and around him widening rings of cousinship extended to the very verge of the clan. The Islesman is a Highlander of the Highlanders; modern life took longer in reaching him, and his weeping climate, his misty wreaths and vapours, and the silence of his moory environments, naturally continued to act upon and to shape his character. He is song-loving, "of imagination all compact;" and out of the natural phenomena of his mountain region--his mist and rain-cloud, wan sea-setting of the moon, stars glancing through rifts of vapour, blowing wind and broken rainbows--he has drawn his poetry and his superstition. His mists give him the shroud high on the living heart, the sea-foam gives him an image of the whiteness of the breasts of his girls, and the broken rainbow of their blushes. To a great extent his climate has made him what he is. He is a child of the mist. His songs are melancholy for the most part; and you may discover in his music the monotony of the brown moor, the seethe of the wave on the rock, the sigh of the wind in the long grasses of the deserted churchyard. The musical instrument in which he chiefly delights renders most successfully the coronach and the battle-march. The Highlands are now open to all the influences of civilisation. The inhabitants wear breeches and speak English even as we. Old gentlemen peruse their _Times_ with spectacles on nose. Young lads construe "Cornelius Nepos," even as in other quarters of the British islands. Young ladies knit, and practise music, and wear crinoline. But the old descent and breeding are visible through all modern disguises: and your Highlander at Oxford or Cambridge--discoverable not only by his rocky countenance, but by some dash of wild blood, or eccentricity, or enthusiasm, or logical twist and turn of thought--is as much a child of the mist as his ancestor who, three centuries ago, was called a "wilde man" or a "red shanks;" who could, if need were, live on a little oatmeal, sleep in snow, and, with one hand on the stirrup, keep pace with the swiftest horse, let the rider spur never so fiercely. It is in the Isles, however, and particularly amongst the old Islesmen, that the Highland character is, at this day, to be found in its purity. There, in the dwelling of the proprietor, or still more in that of the large sheep farmer--who is of as good blood as the laird himself--you find the hospitality, the prejudice, the generosity, the pride of birth, the delight in ancient traditions, which smack of the antique time. Love of wandering, and pride in military life, have been characteristic of all the old families. The pen is alien to their fingers, but they have wielded the sword industriously. They have had representatives in every Peninsular and Indian battle-field. India has been the chosen field of their activity. Of the miniatures kept in every family more than one-half are soldiers, and several have attained to no inconsiderable rank. The Island of Skye has itself given to the British and Indian armies at least a dozen generals. And in other services the Islesman has drawn his sword. Marshal Macdonald had Hebridean blood in his veins; and my friend Mr M'Ian remembers meeting him at Armadale Castle while hunting up his relations in the island, and tells me that he looked like a Jesuit in his long coat. And lads, to whom the profession of arms has been shut, have gone to plant indigo in Bengal or coffee in Ceylon, and have returned with gray hairs to the island to spend their money there, and to make the stony soil a little greener; and during their thirty years of absence Gaelic did not moulder on their tongues, nor did their fingers forget their cunning with the pipes. The palm did not obliterate the memory of the birch; nor the slow up-swelling of the tepid wave, and its long roar of frothy thunder on the flat red sands at Madras, the coasts of their childhood and the smell and smoke of burning kelp.

[Sidenote: Macdonald and Macleod.]

The important names in Skye are Macdonald and Macleod. Both are of great antiquity, and it is as difficult to discover the source of either in history as it is to discover the source of the Nile in the deserts of Central Africa. Distance in the one case appals the geographer, and in the other the antiquary. Macdonald is of pure Celtic origin, it is understood; Macleod was originally a Norseman. Macdonald was the Lord of the Isles, and more than once crossed swords with Scottish kings. Time has stripped him of royalty, and the present representative of the family is a Baron merely. He sits in his modern castle of Armadale amid pleasant larch plantations, with the figure of Somerlid--the half mythical founder of his race--in the large window of his hall. The two families intermarried often and quarrelled oftener. They put wedding rings on each other's fingers and dirks into each other's hearts. Of the two, Macleod had the darker origin; and around his name there lingers a darker poetry. Macdonald sits in his new castle in sunny Sleat with a southern outlook--Macleod retains his old eyrie at Dunvegan, with its drawbridge and dungeons. At night he can hear the sea beating on the base of his rock. His "maidens" are wet with the sea foam. His mountain "tables" are shrouded with the mists of the Atlantic. He has a fairy flag in his possession. The rocks and mountains around him wear his name even as of old did his clansmen. "Macleod's country," the people yet call the northern portion of the island. In Skye song and tradition Macdonald is like the green strath with milkmaids milking kine in the fold at sunset, with fishers singing songs as they mend brown nets on the shore. Macleod, on the other hand, is of darker and drearier import--like a wild rocky spire of Ouirang or Storr, dimmed with the flying vapour and familiar with the voice of the blast and the wing of the raven. "Macleod's country" looks toward Norway with the pale headlands of Greshornish, Trotternish, and Durinish. The portion of the island which Macdonald owns is comparatively soft and green, and lies to the south.

[Sidenote: King Haco.]

The Western Islands lie mainly out of the region of Scottish history, and yet by Scottish history they are curiously touched at intervals, Skye more particularly so. In 1263 when King Haco set out on his great expedition against Scotland with one hundred ships and twenty thousand men--an Armada, the period taken into consideration, quite as formidable as the more famous and ill-fated Spanish one some centuries later--the multitude of his sails darkened the Skye lochs. Snizort speaks of him yet. He passed through the Kyles, breathed for a little while at Kerrera, and then swept down on the Ayrshire coast, where King Alexander awaited him, and where the battle of Largs was fought.[1] After the battle Haco, grievously tormented by tempests, sailed for Norway, where he died. [Sidenote: Ceding of the Hebrides to Scotland.] This was the last invasion of the Northmen, and a few years after the islands were formally ceded to Scotland. Although ceded, however, they could hardly be said to be ruled by the Scottish kings. After the termination of the Norway government, the Hebrides were swayed by the Macdonalds, who called themselves Lords of the Isles. [Sidenote: The Lords of the Isles.] These chieftains waxed powerful, and they more than once led the long-haired Islesmen into Scotland, where they murdered, burned, and ravaged without mercy. In 1411 Donald, one of those island kings, descended on the mainland, and was sorely defeated by the Earl of Mar at Harlaw, near Aberdeen. By another potentate of the same stock the counties of Ross and Moray were ravaged in 1456. In the Western Islands the Macdonalds exercised authentic sovereignty; they owned allegiance to the Scottish king when he penetrated into their remote dominions, and disowned it whenever he turned his back. The Macdonald dynasty, or quasi dynasty, existed till 1536, when the last Lord of the Isles died without an heir, and when there was no shoulder on which the mantle of his authority could fall.

How the Macdonalds came into their island throne it would be difficult, by the flickering rushlight of history, to discover. But wandering up and down the islands, myself and the narrator swathed in a film of blue peat-smoke, a ray of dusty light streaming in through the green bull's-eye in the window, I have heard the following account given:--The branches of the Macdonald family, Macdonald of Sleat, Clanranald, who wears the white heather in his bonnet, the analogue of the white rose, and which has been dipped in blood quite as often, Keppoch, one of whose race fell at Culloden, and the rest, were descended from a certain Godfrey, King of Argyll. This Godfrey had four sons, and one of them was named Somerlid, youngest, bravest, handsomest of all. But unhappily Somerlid was without ambition. While his brothers were burning and ravaging and slaying, grasping lands and running away with rich heiresses, after the fashion of promising young gentlemen of that era, the indolent and handsome giant employed himself in hunting and fishing. His looking-glass was the stream; his drinking-cup the heel of his shoe; he would rather spear a salmon than spear his foe; he burned no churches, the only throats he cut were the throats of deer; he cared more to caress the skins of seals and otters than the shining hair of women. Old Godfrey liked the lad's looks, but had a contempt for his peaceful ways, and, shaking his head, thought him little better than a ne'er-do-weel or a silly one. But for all that, there was a deal of unsuspected matter in Somerlid. At present he was peaceful as a torch or a beacon--unlit. The hour was coming when he would be changed; when he would blaze like a brandished torch, or a beacon on a hill-top against which the wind is blowing.

[Sidenote: Somerlid.]

It so happened that the men of the Western Isles had lost their chief. There was no one to lead them to battle, and it was absolutely necessary that a leader should be procured. Much meditating to whom they should offer their homage they bethought themselves of the young hunter chasing deer on the Argyllshire hills. A council was held; and it was resolved that a deputation should be sent to Somerlid to state their case, and to offer that if he should accept the office of chieftain, he and his children should be their chieftains for ever. In some half-dozen galleys the deputation set sail, and finally arrived at the court of old Godfrey. When they told what they wanted, that potentate sent them to seek Somerlid; and him they found fishing. Somerlid listened to their words with an unmoved countenance; and when they were done, he went aside a little to think over the matter. That done he came forward: "Islesmen," he said, "there's a newly-run salmon in the black pool yonder. If I catch him, I shall go with you as your chief; if I catch him not, I shall remain where I am." To this the men of the Isles were agreeable, and they sat down on the banks of the river to watch the result. Somerlid threw his line over the black pool, and in a short time the silvery mail of the salmon was gleaming on the yellow sands of the river bank. When they saw this the Islesmen shouted; and so after bidding farewell to his father, the elect of the thousands stepped into the largest galley, and with the others in his wake, sailed toward Skye a chief!

When was there a warrior like Somerlid? He spoiled and ravaged like an eagle. He delighted in battle. He rolled his garments in blood. He conquered island after island; he went out with empty galleys, and he returned with them filled with prey, his oarsmen singing his praises. He built up his island throne. He was the first Lord of the Isles; and from his loins sprung all the Lords of the Isles that ever were. He was a Macdonald, and from him the Macdonalds of Sleat are descended. He wore a tartan of his own, which only the Prince of Wales and the young Lord Macdonald, sitting to-day in Eton school, are entitled to wear. And if at any time I ventured to impugn the truth of this legend, I was told that if I went to Armadale Castle I should see the image of Somerlid in the great window of the hall. That was surely confirmation of the truth of the story. He must surely be a sceptical Sassenach who would disbelieve after witnessing _that_.

Although the Lords of the Isles exercised virtual sovereignty in the Hebrides, the Jameses made many attempts to break their power and bring them into subjection. James I. penetrated into the Highlands, and assembled a Parliament at Inverness in 1427. He enticed many of the chiefs to his court, and seized, imprisoned, and executed several of the more powerful. Those who escaped with their lives were forced to deliver up hostages. In fact, the Scottish kings looked upon the Highlanders very much as they looked upon the borderers. In moments of fitful energy they broke on the Highlands just as they broke upon Ettrick and Liddesdale, and hanged and executed right and left. One of the Acts of Parliament of James IV. declared that the Highlands and Islands had become savage for want of a proper administration of justice; and James V. made a voyage to the Islands in 1536, when many of the chiefs were captured and carried away. It was about this time that the last Lord of the Isles died. The Jameses were now kings of the Highlands and Islands, but they were only kings in a nominal sense. Every chief regarded himself as a sort of independent prince. The Highland chieftains appeared at Holyrood, it is true; but they drew dirks and shed blood in the presence; they were wanting in reverence for the sceptre; they brought their own feuds with them to the Scottish court, and when James VI. attempted to dissolve these feuds in the wine cup, he met with but indifferent success. So slight was lawful authority in 1589 that the island of the Lewes was granted by the crown to a body of Fife gentlemen, if they would but take and hold possession--just as the lands of the rebellious Maories might be granted to the colonists at the present day.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Armada.]

Many a gallant ship of the Spanish Armada was wrecked on the shores of the Western Islands, on the retreat to Spain; and a gun taken from one of these, it is said, lies at Dunstaffnage Castle. In the Islands you yet come across Spanish names, and traces of Spanish blood; and the war ships of Spain that came to grief on the bleak headlands of Skye and Lewes, may have something to do with that. Where the vase is broken there still lingers the scent of the roses. The connexion between Spain and the Western Islands is little more than a mere accident of tempest. Then came the death of Elizabeth and the accession of James to the English throne; and the time was fast approaching when the Highlander would become a more important personage than ever; when the claymore would make its mark in British History.

At first sight it is a matter of wonder that the clans should ever have become Jacobite. They were in nowise indebted to the house of Stuart. With the Scottish kings the Highlands and Islands were almost continually at war. When a James came amongst the northern chieftains he carried an ample death-warrant in his face. The presents he brought were the prison key, the hangman's rope, the axe of the executioner. When the power departed from the Lords of the Isles, the clans regarded the king who sat in Holyrood as their nominal superior; but they were not amenable to any central law; each had its own chief--was self-contained, self-governed, and busy with its own private revenges and forays. When the Lowland burgher was busy with commerce, and the Lowland farmer was busy with his crops, the clansman walked his misty mountains very much as his fathers did centuries before; and his hand was as familiar with the hilt of his broadsword as the hand of the Perth burgher with the ellwand, or that of the farmer of the Lothians with the plough-shaft. The Lowlander had become industrious and commercial; the Highlander still loved the skirmish and the raid. The Lowlands had become rich in towns, in money, in goods; the Highlands were rich only in swordsmen. [Sidenote: Montrose.] When Charles's troubles with his Parliament began, the valour of the Highlands was wasting itself; and Montrose was the first man who saw how that valour could be utilised. Himself a feudal chief, and full of feudal feeling, when he raised the banner of the king he appealed to the ancient animosities of the clans. His arch-foe was Argyll; he knew that Campbell was a widely-hated name; and that hate he made his recruiting sergeant. He bribed the chiefs, but his bribe was revenge. The mountaineers flocked to his standard; but they came to serve themselves rather than to serve Charles. The defeat of Argyll might be a good thing for the king; but with that they had little concern--it was the sweetest of private revenges, and righted a century of wrongs. The Macdonalds of Sleat fought under the great Marquis at Inverlochy; but the Skye shepherd considers only that on that occasion his forefathers had a grand slaying of their hereditary enemies--he has no idea that the interest of the king was at all involved in the matter. While the battle was proceeding, blind Allan sat on the castle walls with a little boy beside him; the boy related how the battle went, and the bard wove the incidents into extemporaneous song--full of scorn and taunts when the retreat of Argyll in his galley is described--full of exultation when the bonnets of fifteen hundred dead Campbells are seen floating in the Lochy--and blind Allan's song you can hear repeated in Skye at this day. When the splendid career of Montrose came to an end at Philiphaugh, the clansmen who won his battles for him were no more adherents of the king than they had been centuries before: but then they had gratified hatred; they had had ample opportunities for plunder; the chiefs had gained a new importance; they had been assured of the royal gratitude and remembrance; and if they received but scant supplies of royal gold, they were promised argosies. By fighting under Montrose they were in a sense committed to the cause of the king; and when at a later date Claverhouse again raised the royal standard, that argument was successfully used. They had already served the house of Stuart; they had gained victories in its behalf: the king would not always be in adversity; the time would come when he would be able to reward his friends; having put their hands to the plough it would be folly to turn back. And so a second time the clans rose, and at Killiecrankie an avalanche of kilted men broke the royal lines, and in a quarter of an hour a disciplined army was in ruins, and the bed of the raging Garry choked with corpses. By this time the Stuart cause had gained a footing in the Highlands, mainly from the fact that the clans had twice fought in its behalf. Then a dark whisper of the massacre of Glencoe passed through the glens--and the clansmen believed that the princes _they_ had served would not have violated every claim of hospitality, and shot them down so on their own hearthstones. All this confirmed the growing feeling of attachment to the king across the water. When the Earl of Mar rose in 1715, Macdonald of Sleat joined him with his men; and being sent out to drive away a party of the enemy who had appeared on a neighbouring height, opened the battle of Sheriffmuir. [Sidenote: "The Forty-five."] In 1745, when Prince Charles landed in Knoydart, he sent letters to Macdonald and Macleod in Skye soliciting their aid. Between them they could have brought 2000 claymores into the field; and had the prince brought a foreign force with them, they might have complied with his request. As it was, they hesitated, and finally resolved to range themselves on the side of the Government. Not a man from Sleat fought under the prince. The other great branches of the Macdonald family, Clanranald, Keppoch, and Glengarry, joined him however; and Keppoch at Culloden, when he found that his men were broken, and would not rally at the call of their chief, charged the English lines alone, and was brought down by a musket bullet.

[Sidenote: Flora Macdonald and Prince Charles.]

The Skye gentlemen did not rise at the call of the prince, but when his cause was utterly lost, a Skye lady came to his aid, and rendered him essential service. Neither at the time, nor afterwards, did Flora Macdonald consider herself a heroine, (although Grace Darling herself did not bear a braver heart;) and she is noticeable to this day in history, walking demurely with the white rose in her bosom. When the prince met Miss Macdonald in Benbecula, he was in circumstances sufficiently desperate. The lady had expressed an anxious desire to see Charles; and at their meeting, which took place in a hut belonging to her brother, it struck Captain O'Neil, an officer attached to the prince, and at the moment the sole companion of his wanderings, that she might carry Charles with her to Skye in the disguise of her maid-servant. Miss Macdonald consented. She procured a six-oared boat, and when she and her companions entered the hovel in which the prince lay, they found him engaged in roasting for dinner with a wooden spit the heart, liver, and kidneys of a sheep. They were full of compassion, of course; but the prince, who possessed the wit as well as the courage of his family, turned his misfortunes into jests. The party sat down to dinner not uncareless of state. Flora sat on the right hand, and Lady Clanranald, one of Flora's companions, on the left hand of the prince. They talked of St James's as they sat at their rude repast; and stretching out hands of hope, warmed themselves at the fire of the future.