Chapter VII: Part 7

"Also the main fleet, off Largs, suffered greatly by the same tempest. It began in the night between Sunday (Sept. 30) and Monday (Oct. 1,) accompanied by violent showers. A large transport vessel drifted down on the bow of the royal ship, swept off the gallion, and got foul of the cable; it was at last cast loose and drifted toward the island; but on the royal ship it had been necessary to remove the usual awnings and covers, and in the morning (Oct. 1) when the flood commenced, the wind likewise turned, and the vessel, along with another vessel of transport and a ship of war, was driven on the main beach, where it stuck fast, the royal ship drifting down while with five anchors, and only stopped when the eighth had been let go. The king had found it safest to land in a boat on the Cumrey, with the clergy, who celebrated mass, the greater part believing that the tempest had been raised by witchcraft. Soon the other ships began to drift; several had to cut away the masts; five drifted towards the shore, and three went aground. The men on board these ships were now dangerously situated, because the Scotch, who from their elevated position could see very well what passed in the fleet, sent down detachments against them, while the storm prevented their comrades in the fleet from coming to their aid. They manned, however, the large vessel which had first drifted on shore, and defended themselves as well as they could against the superior force of the enemy, who began shooting at them. Happily the storm abated a little, and the king was not only able to return on board his ships, but even sent them some aid in boats; the Scotch were put to flight, and the Norwegians were able to pass the night on shore. Yet, in the dark, some Scots found their way to the vessel and took what they could. In the morning (Tuesday, Oct. 2,) the king himself, with some barons and some troops, went to shore in boats to secure the valuable cargo of the transport, or what was left of it, in which they succeeded. Now, however, the main army of the Scots was seen approaching, and the king, who at first meant to remain on shore and head his troops himself, was prevailed upon by his men, who feared lest he should expose himself too much, to return on board his ship. The number of the Norwegians left on shore did not exceed 1000 men, 240 of whom, commanded by the Baron Agmund Krokidans, occupied a hillock, the rest were stationed on the beach. The Scotch, it is related in the Saga, had about 600 horsemen in armour, several of whom had Spanish steeds, all covered with mail; they had a great deal of infantry, well armed, especially with bows and Lochaber axes. The Norwegians believed that King Alexander himself was in the army: perhaps this is true. We learn, however, from Fordun that the real commander was Alexander of Dundonald, the Stewart of Scotland. The Scotch first attacked the knoll with the 240 men, who retired slowly, always facing the enemy and fighting; but in retracing their steps down hill, as they could not avoid accelerating their movement as the impulse increased, those on the beach believed that they were routed, and a sudden panic betook them for a moment, which cost many lives; as the boats were too much crowded they sank with their load; others, who did not reach the boats, fled in a southerly direction, and were pursued by the Scotch, who killed many of them; others sought refuge in the aforesaid stranded vessel: at last they rallied behind one of the stranded ships of war, and an obstinate battle began; the Norwegians, now that the panic was over, fighting desperately. Then it was that the young and valiant Piers of Curry, of whom even Fordun and Wyntown speak, was killed by the Norwegian baron Andrew Nicholasson, after having twice ridden through the Norwegian ranks. The storm for a while prevented King Hacon from aiding his men, and the Scotch being tenfold stronger, began to get the upper hand; but at last two barons succeeded in landing with fresh troops, when the Scotch were gradually driven back upon the knoll, and then put to flight towards the hills. This done, the Norwegians returned on board the ships; on the following morning (Oct. 3) they returned on shore to carry away the bodies of the slain, which, it appears, they effected quite unmolested by the enemy; all the bodies were carried to a church, no doubt in Bute, and there buried. The next day, (Thursday, Oct. 4,) the king removed his ship farther out under the island, and the same day the detachment arrived which had been sent to Loch Long. The following day, (Friday, Oct. 5,) the weather being fair, the king sent men on shore to burn the stranded ships, which likewise appears to have been effected without any hindrance from the enemy. On the same day he removed with the whole fleet to Lamlash harbour."

With what a curious particularity the Saga relates the events of this smokeless ancient combat--so different from modern ones, where "the ranks are rolled in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound"--and how Piers of Curry, "who had ridden twice through the Norwegian ranks," towers amongst the combatants! As the describer of battles, since the invention of gunpowder, Homer would be no better than Sir Archibald Alison. We have more explicit information as to this skirmish on the Ayrshire coast in the thirteenth century than we have concerning the battle of Solferino; and yet King Hacon has been in his grave these five centuries, and Napoleon III. and Kaiser Joseph yet live. And "Our Own Correspondent" had not come into the world at that date either.

[2] For this translation I am indebted to my learned and accomplished friend the Rev. Mr Macpherson of Inverary.

_THE SECOND SIGHT._

[Sidenote: Quirang.]

The Quirang is one of the wonderful sights of Skye, and if you once visit it you will believe ever afterwards the misty and spectral Ossian to be authentic. The Quirang is a nightmare of nature; it resembles one of Nat Lee's mad tragedies; it might be the scene of a Walpurgis night; on it might be held a Norway witch's Sabbath. Architecture is frozen music, it is said; the Quirang is frozen terror and superstition. 'Tis a huge spire or cathedral of rock some thousand feet in height, with rocky spires or needles sticking out of it. Macbeth's weird sisters stand on the blasted heath, and Quirang stands in a region as wild as itself. The country around is strange and abnormal, rising into rocky ridges here, like the spine of some huge animal, sinking into hollows there, with pools in the hollows--glimmering almost always through drifts of misty rain. On a clear day, with a bright sun above, the ascent of Quirang may be pleasant enough; but a clear day you seldom find, for on spectral precipices and sharp-pointed rocky needles, the weeping clouds of the Atlantic have made their chosen home. When you ascend, with every ledge and block slippery, every runnel a torrent, the wind taking liberties with your cap and making your plaid stream like a meteor to the troubled air, white tormented mists boiling up from black chasms and caldrons, rain making disastrous twilight of noon-day,--horror shoots through your pulses, your brain swims on the giddy pathway, and the thought of your room in the vapoury under world rushes across the soul like the fallen Adam's remembrance of his paradise. Then you learn, if you never learned before, that nature is not always gracious; that not always does she out-stretch herself in low-lying bounteous lands, over which sober sunsets redden and heavy-uddered cattle low; but that she has fierce hysterical moods in which she congeals into granite precipice and peak, and draws around herself and her companions the winds that moan and bluster, veils of livid rains. If you are an Englishman you will habitually know her in her gracious, if a Skye man in her fiercer, moods.

[Sidenote: The Saxon and the Celt.]

No one is independent of scenery and climate. Men are racy of the soil in which they grow, even as grapes are. A Saxon nurtured in fat Kent or Sussex, amid flats of heavy wheat and acorn-dropping oaks, must of necessity be a different creature from the Celt who gathers his sustenance from the bleak sea-board, and who is daily drenched by the rain-cloud from Cuchullin. The one, at his best, becomes a broad-shouldered, clear-eyed, ruddy-faced man, slightly obese, who meets danger gleefully, because he has had little experience of it, and because his conditions being hitherto easy, he naturally assumes that everything will go well with him;--at worst, a porker contented with his mast. The other, take him at his best, of sharper spirit, because it has been more keenly whetted on difficulty; if not more intrepid, at least more consciously so; of sadder mood habitually, but _when_ happy, happier, as the gloomier the cloud the more dazzling the rainbow;--at his worst, either beaten down, subdued, and nerveless, or gaunt, suspicious, and crafty, like the belly-pinched wolf. On the whole, the Saxon is likely to be the more sensual; the Celt the more superstitious: the Saxon will probably be prosaic, dwelling in the circle of the seen and the tangible; the Celt a poet: while the anger of the Saxon is slow and abiding, like the burning of coal; the anger of the Celt is swift and transient, like the flame that consumes the dried heather: both are superior to death when occasion comes--the Saxon from a grand obtuseness which ignores the fact; the Celt, because he has been in constant communion with it, and because he has seen, measured, and overcome it. The Celt is the most melancholy of men; he has turned everything to superstitious uses, and every object of nature, even the unreasoning dreams of sleep, are mirrors which flash back death upon him. He, the least of all men, requires to be reminded that he is mortal. The howling of his dog will do him that service.

[Sidenote: Superstitious feelings.]

In the stories which are told round the island peat-fires it is abundantly apparent that the Celt has not yet subdued nature. In these stories you can detect a curious subtle hostility between man and his environments; a fear of them, a want of absolute trust in them. In these stories and songs man is not at home in the world. Nature is too strong for him; she rebukes and crushes him. The Elements, however calm and beautiful they may appear for the moment, are malign and deceitful at heart, and merely bide their time. They are like the paw of the cat--soft and velvety, but with concealed talons that scratch when least expected. And this curious relation between man and nature grows out of the climatic conditions and the forms of Hebridean life. In his usual avocations the Islesman rubs clothes with death as he would with an acquaintance. Gathering wild fowl, he hangs, like a spider on its thread, over a precipice on which the sea is beating a hundred feet beneath. In his crazy boat he adventures into whirlpool and foam. He is among the hills when the snow comes down making everything unfamiliar, and stifling the strayed wanderer. Thus death is ever near him, and that consciousness turns everything to omen. The mist creeping along the hill-side by moonlight is an apparition. In the roar of the waterfall, or the murmur of the swollen ford, he hears the water spirit calling out for the man for whom it has waited so long. He sees death-candles burning on the sea, marking the place at which a boat will be upset by some sudden squall. He hears spectral hammers clinking in an outhouse, and he knows that ghostly artificers are preparing a coffin there. Ghostly fingers tap at his window, ghostly feet are about his door; at midnight his furniture cries out as if it had seen a sight and could not restrain itself. Even his dreams are prophetic, and point ghastly issues for himself or for others. And just as there are poets who are more open to beauty than other men, and whose duty and delight it is to set forth that beauty anew; so in the Hebrides there are seers who bear the same relation to the other world that the poet bears to beauty, who are cognisant of its secrets, and who make those secrets known. The seer does not inherit his power. It comes upon him at haphazard, as genius or as personal beauty might come. He is a lonely man amongst his fellows; apparitions cross his path at noon-day; he never knows into what a ghastly something the commonest object may transform itself--the table he sits at may suddenly become the resting-place of a coffin; and the man who laughs in his cups with him may, in the twinkling of an eye, wear a death-shroud up to his throat. He hears river voices prophesying death, and shadowy and silent funeral processions are continually defiling before him. When the seer beholds a vision his companions know it; for "the inner part of his eyelids turn so far upwards that, after the object disappears, he must draw them down with his fingers, and sometimes employs others to draw them down, which he finds to be much the easier way." From long experience of these visions, and by noticing how closely or tardily fulfilment has trodden upon their heels, the seer can extract the meaning of the apparition that flashes upon him, and predict the period of its accomplishment. Other people can make nothing of them, but _he_ reads them, as the sailor in possession of the signal-book reads the signal flying at the peak of the High Admiral. These visions, it would appear, conform to rules, like everything else. If a vision be seen early in a morning, it will be accomplished in a few hours,--if at noon, it will usually be accomplished that day,--if in the evening, that night,--if after candles are lighted, certainly that night. When a shroud is seen about a person it is a sure prognostication of death. And the period of death is estimated by the height of the shroud about the body. If it lies about the legs, death is not to be expected before the expiry of a year, and perhaps it may be deferred a few months longer. If it is seen near the head, death will occur in a few days, perhaps in a few hours. To see houses and trees in a desert place is a sign that buildings will be erected there anon. To see a spark of fire falling on the arms or breast of a person is the sign that a dead child will shortly be in the arms of those persons. To see a seat empty at the time of sitting in it is a sign of that person's death being at hand. The seers are said to be extremely temperate in habit; they are neither drunkards nor gluttons; they are not subject to convulsions nor hysterical fits; there are no madmen amongst them; nor has a seer ever been known to commit suicide.

[Sidenote: The second sight.]

The literature of the second sight is extremely curious. The writers have perfect faith in the examples they adduce; but their examples are far from satisfactory. They are seldom obtained at first hand, they almost always live on hearsay; and even if everything be true, the professed fulfilment seems nothing other than a rather singular coincidence. Still these stories are devoutly believed in Skye, and it is almost as perilous to doubt the existence of a Skyeman's ghost as to doubt the existence of a Skyeman's ancestor. In "Treatises on the Second Sight," very curious tracts, compiled by Theophilus Insulanus, Rev. Mr Frazer, Mr Martin, and John Aubrey, Esq., F.R.S., and which hint that a disbelief in apparitions is tantamount to disbelief in the immortality of the soul, the following stories are related:--

"John Campbell, younger of Ardsliguish, in Ardnamorchuann, in the year 1729, returning home with Duncan Campbell, his brother, since deceased, as they drew near the house, in a plain surrounded with bushes of wood, where they intended to discharge their fusees at a mark, observed a young girl, whom they knew to be one of their domestics, crossing the plain, and having called her by name, she did not answer, but ran into the thicket. As the two brothers had been some days from home, and willing to know what happened in their absence, the youngest, John, pursued after, but could not find her. Immediately, as they arrived at home, having acquainted their mother they saw the said girl, and called after her, but she avoided their search, and would not speak to them; upon which they were told she departed this life that same day. I had this relation from James Campbell in Girgudale, a young man of known modesty and candour, who had the story at several times from the said John Campbell."

"Mr Anderson assured me, that upon the 16th of April 1746, (being the day on which his Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland obtained a glorious victory over the rebels at Culloden,) as he lay in bed with his spouse towards the dawning of the day, he heard very audibly a voice at his bed-head inquiring if he was awake; who answered he was, but then took no further notice of it. A little time thereafter, the voice repeated, with greater vehemence, if he was awake. And he answering, as formerly, he was, there was some stop, when the voice repeated louder, asking the same question, and he making the same answer, but asking what the voice had to say; upon which it replied, The prince is defeated, defeated, defeated! And in less than forty-eight hours thereafter an express carried the welcome tidings of the fact into the country."

"Captain Macdonald of Castletown (allowed by all his acquaintances to be a person of consummate integrity) informed me that a Knoydart man (being on board of a vessel at anchor in the sound of the Island Oransay) went under night out of the cabin to the deck, and being missed by his company, some of them went to call him down; but not finding him, concluded that he had dropt from the ship's side. When day came on, they got a long line furnished with hooks, (from a tenant's house close by the shore,) which having cast from the ship's side, some of the hooks got hold of his clothes, so that they got the corpse taken up. The owner of the long line told Captain Macdonald that for a quarter of a year before that accident happened, he himself and his domestics, on every calm night, would hear lamentable cries at the shore where the corpse was landed; and not only so, but the long lines that took up the corpse being hung on a pin in his house, all of them would hear an odd jingling of the hooks before and after going to bed, and that without any person, dog, or cat touching them; and at other times, with fire light, see the long lines covered over with lucid globules, such as are seen drop from oars rowing under night."

The foregoing are examples of the general superstitions that prevail in the islands; those that follow relate to the second sight.

"The Lady Coll informed me that one M'Lean of Knock, an elderly reputable gentleman, living on their estate, as he walked in the fields before sunset, he saw a neighbouring person, who had been sick for a long time, coming that way, accompanied by another man; and, as they drew nearer, he asked them some questions, and how far they intended to go. The first answered they were to travel forward to a village he named, and then pursued his journey with a more than ordinary pace. Next day, early in the morning, he was invited to his neighbour's interment, which surprised him much, as he had seen and spoke with him the evening before; but was told by the messenger that came for him, the deceased person had been confined to his bed for seven weeks, and that he departed this life a little before sunset, much about the time he saw him in a vision the preceding day."

"Margaret Macleod, an honest woman advanced in years, informed me that when she was a young woman in the family of Grishornish, a dairy-maid, who daily used to herd the calves in a park close to the house, observed, at different times, a woman resembling herself in shape and attire, walking solitarily at no great distance from her; and being surprised at the apparition, to make further trial, she put the back part of her garment foremost, and anon the phantom was dressed in the same manner, which made her uneasy, believing it portended some fatal consequence to herself. In a short time thereafter she was seized with a fever, which brought her to her end; but before her sickness, and on her deathbed, declared this second sight to several."

"Neil Betton, a sober, judicious person, and elder in the session of Diurinish, informed me, as he had it from the deceased Mr Kenneth Betton, late minister in Trotternish, that a farmer in the village of Airaidh, on the west side of the country, being towards evening to quit his work, he observed a traveller coming towards him as he stood close to the highway; and, as he knew the man, waited his coming up; but when he began to speak with him, the traveller broke off the road abruptly to the shore that was hard by; which, how soon he entered, he gave a loud cry; and, having proceeded on the shore, gave a loud cry at the middle of it, and so went on until he came to a river running through the middle of it, which he no sooner entered than he gave a third cry, and then saw him no more. On the farmer's coming home he told all that he had heard and seen to those of his household: so the story spread, until from hand to hand it came to the person's own knowledge, who, having seen the farmer afterwards, inquired of him narrowly about it, who owned and told the same as above. In less than a year thereafter, the same man, going with two more to cut wattling for creels, in Coille-na-Skiddil, he and they were drowned in the river where he heard him give the last cry."

"Some of the inhabitants of Harris sailing round the Isle of Skye, with a design to go to the opposite mainland, were strangely surprised with an apparition of two men hanging down by the ropes that secured the mast, but could not conjecture what it meant. They pursued the voyage; but the wind turned contrary, and so forced them into Broadford, in the Isle of Skye, where they found Sir Donald Macdonald keeping a sheriff's court, and two criminals receiving sentence of death there. The ropes and masts of that very boat were made use of to hang those criminals."

[Sidenote: Death sights and omens.]

Such are some of the stories laboriously gathered together and set down in perfect good faith by Theophilus Insulanus. It will be seen that they are loosely reported, are always at second or third hand, and that, if the original teller of the stories could be placed in the witness-box, a strict cross-examination would make sad havoc with him and them. But although sufficiently ridiculous and foolish in themselves, they exemplify the strange ghostly atmosphere which pervades the western islands. Every one of the people amongst whom I now live believes in apparitions and the second sight. Mr M'Ian has seen a ghost himself, but he will not willingly speak about it. A woman gifted with the second sight dwells in one of the smoking turf huts on the shore. At night, round a precipitous rock that overhangs the sea, about a hundred yards from the house, a light was often seen to glide, and evil was apprehended. For years the patient light abode there. At last a boy, the son of one of the cotters, climbing about the rock, missed his footing, fell into the sea and was drowned, and from that hour the light was never more visible. At a ford up amongst the hills, the people tell me doleful cries have been heard at intervals for years. The stream has waited long for its victim, but I am assured that it will get it at last. That a man will yet be drowned there is an article of faith amongst the cotters. But who? I suspect _I_ am regarded as the likely person. Perhaps the withered crone down in the turf hut yonder knows the features of the doomed man. This prevailing superstitious feeling takes curious possession of one somehow. You cannot live in a ghostly atmosphere without being more or less affected by it. Lying a-bed you don't like to hear the furniture of your bedroom creak. At sunset you are suspicious of the prodigious shadow that stalks alongside of you across the gold-green fields. You become more than usually impressed by the multitudinous and unknown voices of the night. Gradually you get the idea that you and nature are alien; and it is in that feeling of alienation that superstition lives.

[Sidenote: Father M'Crimmon's story.]

Father M'Crimmon and I had been out rabbit-shooting, and, tired of the sport, we sat down to rest on a grassy knoll. The ghostly island stories had taken possession of my mind, and as we sat and smoked I inquired if the priest was a believer in ghosts generally and in the second sight in particular. The gaunt, solemn-voiced, melancholy-eyed man replied that he believed in the existence of ghosts just as he believed in the existence of America--he had never seen America, he had never seen a ghost, but the existence of both he considered was amply borne out by testimony. "I know there is such a thing as the second sight," he went on, "because I have had cognisance of it myself. Six or seven years ago I was staying with my friend Mr M'Ian, as I am staying now, and just as we were sipping a tumbler of punch after dinner we heard a great uproar outside. We went out and found all the farm-servants standing on the grass and gazing seawards. On inquiry, we learned that two brothers, M'Millan by name, who lived down at Stonefield, beyond the point yonder, fishermen by trade, and well versed in the management of a boat, had come up to the islands here to gather razor-fish for bait. When they had secured plenty of bait, they steered for home, although a stiff breeze was blowing. They kept a full sail on, and went straight on the wind. A small boy, Hector, who was employed in herding cows, was watching the boat trying to double the point. All at once he came running into the kitchen where the farm-servants were at dinner. 'Men, men,' he cried, 'come out fast; M'Millan's boat is sinking--I saw her heel over.' Of course the hinds came rushing out bareheaded, and it was the noise they made that disturbed my friend and myself at our punch. All this we gathered in less time than I have taken to tell you. We looked narrowly seaward, but no boat was to be seen. Mr M'Ian brought out his telescope, and still the sea remained perfectly blue and bare. Neither M'Ian nor his servants could be brought to believe Hector's story--they thought it extremely unlikely that on a comparatively calm day any harm could befall such experienced sailors. It was universally agreed that the boat _had_ rounded the point, and Mr M'Ian rated the herd-boy for raising a false alarm. Hector still persisting that he had seen the boat capsize and go down, got his cars soundly boxed for his obstinacy, and was sent whimpering away to his cows, and enjoined in future to mind his own business. Then the servants returned to their dinner in the kitchen, and, going back with me to our punch, which had become somewhat cold, Mr M'Ian resumed his story of the eagle that used to come down the glen in the early mornings and carry away his poultry, and told how he shot it at last and found that it measured six feet from wing-tip to wing-tip.

"But although Hector got his ears boxed it turned out that he had in all probability spoken the truth. Towards the evening of next day the M'Millan sisters came up to the house to inquire after the boat, which had never reached home. The poor girls were in a dreadful state when they were told that their brothers' boat had left the islands the previous afternoon, and what Hector the cow-herd averred he had seen. Still there was room for hope; it was possible that Hector was mistaken, it was possible that the M'Millans might have gone somewhere, or been forced to take shelter somewhere--and so the two sisters, mustering up the best heart they could, went across the hill to Stonefield when the sun was setting, and the sea a sheet of gold leaf, and looking as it could never be angry or have the heart to drown anything.

"Days passed, and the boat never came home, nor did the brothers. It was on Friday that the M'Millans sailed away on the fresh breeze, and on the Wednesday following the bay down there was a sorry sight. The missing sailors were brave, good-looking, merry-hearted, and were liked along the whole coast; and on the Wednesday I speak of no fewer than two hundred and fifty boats were sailing slowly up and down, crossing and re-crossing, trawling for the bodies. I remember the day perfectly. It was dull and sultry, with but little sunshine; the hills over there (Blaavin and the others) were standing dimly in a smoke of heat; and on the smooth pallid sea the mournful multitude of black boats were moving slowly up and down, across and back again. In each boat two men pulled, and the third sat in the stern with the trawling-irons. The day was perfectly still, and I could hear through the heated air the solemn pulses of the oars. The bay was black with the slowly-crawling boats. A sorry sight," said the good priest, filling his second pipe from a tobacco-pouch made of otter's skin.

"I don't know how it was," went on the Father, holding his newly-filled pipe between his forefinger and thumb; "but looking on the black dots of boats, and hearing the sound of their oars, I remembered that old Mirren, who lived in one of the turf huts yonder, had the second sight; and so I thought I would go down and see her. When I got to the hut, I met Mirren coming up from the shore with a basket full of whelks, which she had been gathering for dinner. I went into the hut along with her, and sat down. 'There's a sad business in the bay to-day,' said I. 'A sad business,' said Mirren, as she laid down her basket. 'Will they get the bodies?' Mirren shook her head. 'The bodies are not there to get; they have floated out past Rum to the main ocean.' 'How do you know?' 'Going out to the shore about a month ago I heard a scream, and, looking up, saw a boat off the point, with two men in it, caught in a squall, and going down. When the boat sank the men still remained in it--the one entangled in the fishing-net, the other in the ropes of the sails. I saw them float out to the main sea between the two wines,'--that's a literal translation," said the Father, parenthetically. "You have seen two liquors in a glass--the one floating on the top of the other? Very well; there are two currents in the sea, and when my people wish to describe anything sinking down and floating between these two currents, they use the image of two liquors in a wine-glass. Oh, it's a fine language the Gaelic, and admirably adapted for poetical purposes,--but to return. Mirren told me that she saw the bodies float out to sea between the two wines, and that the trawling boats might trawl for ever in the bay before they would get what they wanted. When evening came, the boats returned home without having found the bodies of the drowned M'Millans. Well," and here the Father lighted his pipe, "six weeks after, a capsized boat was thrown on the shore in Uist, with two corpses inside,--one entangled in the fishing-net, the other in the ropes of the sails. It was the M'Millans' boat, and it was the two brothers who were inside. Their faces were all eaten away by the dog-fishes; but the people who had done business with them in Uist identified them by their clothes. This I know to be true," said the Father emphatically, and shutting the door on all argument or hint of scepticism. "And now, if you are not too tired, suppose we try our luck in the copses down there? 'Twas a famous place for rabbits when I was here last year."

_IN A SKYE BOTHY._

I am quite alone here. England may have been invaded and London sacked, for aught I know. Several weeks since a newspaper, accidentally blown to my solitude, informed me that the _Great Eastern_, with the second American telegraphic cable on board, had got under way, and was about to proceed to sea. There is great joy, I perceive. Human nature stands astonished at itself--felicitates itself on its remarkable talent, and will for months to come complacently purr over its achievement in magazines and reviews. A fine world, messieurs, that will attain to heaven--if in the power of steam. A very fine world; yet for all that, I have withdrawn from it for a time, and would rather not hear of its remarkable exploits. In my present mood, I do not value them the coil of vapour on the brow of Blaavin, which, as I gaze, smoulders into nothing in the fire of sunrise.

Goethe informs us that in his youth he loved to shelter himself in the Scripture narratives from the marching and counter-marching of armies, the cannonading, fighting, and retreating, that went on everywhere around him. He shut his eyes, as it were, and a whole war-convulsed Europe wheeled away into silence and distance; and in its place, lo! the patriarchs, with their tawny tents, their man-servants and maid-servants, and countless flocks in perceptible procession whitening the Syrian plains. In this, my green solitude, I appreciate the full sweetness of the passage. Everything here is silent as the Bible plains themselves. I am cut off from former scenes and associates as by the sullen Styx and the grim ferrying of Charon's boat. The noise of the world does not touch me. I live too far inland to hear the thunder of the reef. To this place no postman comes; no tax-gatherer. This region never heard the sound of the church-going bell. The land is Pagan as when the yellow-haired Norseman landed a thousand years ago. I almost feel a Pagan myself. Not using a notched stick, I have lost all count of time, and don't know Saturday from Sunday. Civilisation is like a soldier's stock, it makes you carry your head a good deal higher, makes the angels weep a little more at your fantastic tricks, and half suffocates you the while. I have thrown it away, and breathe freely. My bed is the heather, my mirror the stream from the hills, my comb and brush the sea breeze, my watch the sun, my theatre the sunset, and my evening service--not without a rude natural religion in it--watching the pinnacles of the hills of Cuchullin sharpening in intense purple against the pallid orange of the sky, or listening to the melancholy voices of the sea-birds and the tide; that over, I am asleep, till touched by the earliest splendour of the dawn. I am, not without reason, hugely enamoured of my vagabond existence.

[Sidenote: In a Skye bothy.]

My bothy is situated on the shores of one of the Lochs that intersect Skye. The coast is bare and rocky, hollowed into fantastic chambers; and when the tide is making, every cavern murmurs like a sea-shell. The land, from frequent rain, green as emerald, rises into soft pastoral heights, and about a mile inland soars suddenly up into peaks of bastard marble, white as the cloud under which the lark sings at noon, and bathed in rosy light at sunset. [Sidenote: The Cuchullins.] In front are the Cuchullin hills and the monstrous peak of Blaavin; then the green strath runs narrowing out to sea, and the Island of Rum, with a white cloud upon it, stretches like a gigantic shadow across the entrance of the loch, and completes the scene. Twice every twenty-four hours the Atlantic tide sets in upon the hollowed shores; twice is the sea withdrawn, leaving spaces of smooth sand on which mermaids, with golden combs, might sleek alluring tresses; and black rocks, heaped with brown dulse and tangle, and lovely ocean blooms of purple and orange; and bare islets--marked at full of tide by a glimmer of pale green amid the universal sparkle--where most the sea-fowl love to congregate. To these islets, on favourable evenings, come the crows, and sit in sable parliament; business despatched, they start into air as at a gun, and stream away through the sunset to their roosting-place in the Armadale woods. The shore supplies for me the place of books and companions. Of course Blaavin and the Cuchullin hills are the chief attractions, and I never weary watching them. In the morning they wear a great white caftan of mist; but that lifts away before noon, and they stand with all their scars and passionate torrent-lines bare to the blue heavens, with perhaps a solitary shoulder for a moment gleaming wet to the sunlight. After a while a vapour begins to steam up from their abysses, gathering itself into strange shapes, knotting and twisting itself like smoke; while above, the terrible crests are now lost, now revealed, in a stream of flying rack. In an hour a wall of rain, gray as granite, opaque as iron to the eye, stands up from sea to heaven. The loch is roughening before the wind, and the islets, black dots a second ago, are patches of roaring foam. You hear fierce sound of its coming. Anon, the lashing tempest sweeps over you, and looking behind, up the long inland glen, you can see the birch-woods and over the sides of the hills, driven on the wind, the white smoke of the rain. Though fierce as a charge of Highland bayonets these squalls are seldom of long duration, and you bless them when you creep from your shelter, for out comes the sun, and the birch-woods are twinkling, and more intensely flash the levels of the sea, and at a stroke the clouds are scattered from the wet brow of Blaavin, and to the whole a new element has been added; the voice of the swollen stream as it rushes red over a hundred tiny cataracts, and roars river-broad into the sea, making turbid the azure. Then I have my amusements in this solitary place. The mountains are of course open, and this morning, at dawn, a roe swept past me like the wind, with its nose to the dewy ground--"tracking," they call it here. Above all, I can wander on the ebbed beach. Hogg speaks of that

"Undefined and mingled hum,
Voice of the desert, never dumb."

But far more than the murmuring and insecty air of the moorland does the wet _chirk-chirking_ of the living shore give one the idea of crowded and multitudinous life. [Sidenote: Hunting razor-fish.] Did the reader ever hunt razor-fish?--not sport like tiger-hunting, I admit; yet it has its pleasures and excitements, and can kill a forenoon for an idle man agreeably. On the wet sands yonder the razor-fish are spouting like the fountains at Versailles on _fête_ day. The shy fellow sinks on discharging his watery _feu de joie_. If you are quickly after him through the sand, you catch him, and then comes the tug of war. Address and dexterity are required. If you pull vigorously, he slips out of his sheath a "mother-naked" mollusc, and escapes. If you do your spiriting gently, you drag him up to light, a long thin case, with a white fishy bulb protruding at one end like a root. Rinse him in sea water, toss him into your basket, and plunge after another watery flash. These razor-fish are excellent eating, the people say, and when used as bait no fish that swims the ocean stream--cod, whiting, haddock, flat skate, broad-shouldered crimson bream--no, not the detested dog-fish himself, this summer swarming in every Loch and becursed by every fisherman--can keep himself off the hook, and in an hour your boat is laden with glittering spoil. Then, if you take your gun to the low islands--and you can go dry-shod at ebb of tide--you have your chance of sea-fowl. Gulls of all kinds are there, dookers and divers of every description, flocks of shy curlews, and specimens of a hundred tribes to which my limited ornithological knowledge cannot furnish a name. The solan goose yonder falls from heaven into the water like a meteor-stone. See the solitary scart, with long narrow wing and outstretched neck, shooting towards some distant promontory. Anon, high above head, come wheeling a covey of lovely sea-swallows. You fire, one flutters down, never more to skim the horizon or to dip in the sea-sparkle. Lift it up; is it not beautiful? The wild, keen eye is closed, but you see the delicate slate-colour of the wings, and the long tail-feathers white as the creaming foam. There is a stain of blood on the breast, hardly brighter than the scarlet of its beak and feet. Lay it down, for its companions are dashing round and round, uttering harsh cries of rage and sorrow; and had you the heart, you could shoot them one by one. At ebb of tide wild-looking children, from turf cabins on the hill-side, come down to hunt shell-fish. Even now a troop is busy; how their shrill voices go the while! [Sidenote: Old Effie.] Old Effie I see is out to-day, quite a picturesque object, with her white cap and red shawl. With a tin can in one hand, an old reaping-hook in the other, she goes poking among the tangle. Let us see what sport she has had. She turns round at our salutation--very old, old almost as the worn rocks around. She might have been the wife of Wordsworth's "Leech-gatherer." Her can is sprawling with brown crabs; and, opening her apron, she exhibits a large black and blue lobster--a fellow such as she alone can capture. A queer woman is Effie, and an awesome. She is familiar with ghosts and apparitions. She can relate legends that have power over the superstitious blood, and with little coaxing will sing those wild Gaelic songs of hers--of dead lights on the sea, of fishing-boats going down in squalls, of unburied bodies tossing day and night upon the gray peaks of the waves, and of girls that pray God to lay them by the sides of their drowned lovers, although for them should never rise mass nor chant, and although their flesh should be torn asunder by the wild fishes of the sea.

Rain is my enemy here; and at this writing I am suffering siege. For three days this rickety dwelling has stood assault of wind and rain. Yesterday a blast breached the door, and the tenement fluttered for a moment like an umbrella caught in a gust. All seemed lost; but the door was got closed again, heavily barred across, and the enemy foiled. An entrance, however, had been effected, and that portion of the attacking column which I had imprisoned by my dexterous manœuvre, maddened itself into whirlwind, rushed up the chimney, scattering my turf-fire as it went, and so escaped. Since that time the windy columns have retired to the gorges of the hills, where I can hear them howl at intervals; and the only thing I am exposed to is the musketry of the rain. How viciously the small shot peppers the walls! Here must I wait till the cloudy armament breaks up. One's own mind is a dull companion in such circumstances. A Sheridan himself--wont with his wit to brighten the feast, whose mind is a phosphorescent sea, dark in its rest, but when touched giving out a flash of splendour for response--if cooped up here would be dull as a Lincolnshire fen at midnight, unenlivened by a single Jack-o'-Lantern. Books are the only refuge on a rainy day; but in Skye bothies books are rare. [Sidenote: The "Monthly Review."] To me, however, the gods have proved kind--for in my sore need I found on a shelf here two volumes of the old _Monthly Review_, and I have sauntered through those dingy literary catacombs with considerable satisfaction. What a strange set of old fogies the writers are! To read them is like conversing with the antediluvians. Their opinions have fallen into disuse long ago, and resemble to-day the rusty armour and gimcracks of an old curiosity shop. Mr Henry Rogers has written a fine essay on the "_Glory and Vanity of Literature_"--in my own thoughts, out of this dingy material before me I can frame a finer. These essays and criticisms were thought brilliant, I suppose, when they appeared last century; and authors praised therein doubtless considered themselves rather handsome flies preserved in pure critical amber for the inspection and admiration of posterity. The volumes were published, I notice, from 1790 to 1792, and exhibit a period of wonderful literary activity. Not to speak of novels, histories, travels, farces, tragedies, upwards of two hundred poems, short and long, are brought to judgment; and several of these--with their names and the names of their authors I have, during the last two days, made acquaintance for the first time--are assured of immortality. Perhaps they deserved it; but they have gone down like the steamship _President_ and left no trace. On the whole, these Monthly Reviewers worked hard, and with proper spirit and deftness. They had a proud sense of the importance of their craft, they laid down the law with great gravity, and from critical benches shook their awful wigs on offenders. How it all looks _now_! "Let us indulge ourselves with another extract," quoth one, "and contemplate once more the tear of grief before we are called upon to witness the tear of rapture." _Both_ tears dried up long ago--like those that may have sparkled on a Pharaoh's cheek. Hear this other, stern as Rhadamanthus. Behold Duty steeling itself against human weakness! "It grieves us to wound a young man's feelings: but our judgment must not be biased by any plea whatsoever. Why will men apply for our opinion when they know that we cannot be silent, and that we will not lie?" Listen to this prophet in Israel, one who has not bent the knee to Baal, and say if there be not a plaintive touch of pathos in him:--"Fine words do not make fine poems. Scarcely a month passes in which we are not obliged to issue this decree. But in these days of universal heresy our decrees are no more respected than the bulls of the Bishop of Rome." Oh that men would hear, that they would incline their hearts to wisdom! One peculiarity I have noticed--the advertisement sheets which accompanied the numbers are bound up with them, and form an integral portion of the volumes. And just as the tobacco-less man whom we met at the entrance to Glen Sligachan smoked the paper in which his roll of pigtail had been wrapped, so when I had finished the criticisms I attacked the advertisements, and found them much the more amusing reading. Might not the magazine-buyer of to-day follow the example of the unknown Islesman? Depend upon it, to the reader of the next century the advertising sheets will be more interesting than the poetry, or the essays, or the stories. The two volumes were a godsend; but at last I began to weary of the old literary churchyard in which the poet and his critic sleep in the same oblivion. When I closed the books, and placed them on their shelves, the rain peppered the walls as pertinaciously as when I took them down.

Next day it rained still. It was impossible to go out; the volumes of the _Monthly Review_ were sucked oranges, and could yield no further amusement or interest. What was to be done? I took refuge with the Muse. Certain notions had got into my brain,--certain stories had taken possession of my memory,--and these I resolved to versify and finally to dispose of. Here are "Poems Written in a Skye Bothy." The competent critic will see at a glance that they are the vilest plagiarisms,--that as throughout I have called the sky "blue" and the grass "green," I have stolen from every English poet from Chaucer downwards; he will observe also, from occasional uses of "all" and "and," that they are the merest Tennysonian echoes. But they served their purpose,--they killed for me the languor of the rainy days, which is more than they are likely to do for the critic. Here they are:--

[Sidenote: The Well.]

THE WELL.

The well gleams by a mountain road
Where travellers never come and go
From city proud, or poor abode
That frets the dusky plain below.
All silent as the mouldering lute
That in a ruin long hath lain;
All empty as a dead man's brain--
The path untrod by human foot,
That, thread-like, far away doth run
To savage peaks, whose central spire
Bids farewell to the setting sun,
Good-morrow to the morning's fire.

The country stretches out beneath
In gloom of wood and gray of heath;
The carriers' carts with mighty loads
Black dot the long white country roads;
The stationary stain of smoke
Is crown'd by spire and castle rock;
A silent line of vapoury white,
The train creeps on from shade to light;
The river journeys to the main
Throughout a vast and endless plain,
Far-shadow'd by the labouring breast
Of thunder leaning o'er the west.

A rough uneven waste of gray,
The landscape stretches day by day;
But strange the sight when evening sails
Athwart the mountains and the vales;
Furnace and forge, by daylight tame,
Uplift their restless towers of flame,
And cast a broad and angry glow
Upon the rain-cloud hanging low;
As dark and darker grows the hour,
More wild their colour, vast their power,
Till by the glare in shepherd's shed,
The mother sings her babe a-bed:
From town to town the pedlar wades
Through far-flung crimson lights and shades.

As softly fall the autumn nights
The city blossoms into lights;
Now here, now there, a sudden spark
Sputters the twilight's light-in-dark;
Afar a glimmering crescent shakes;
The gloom across the valley breaks
In glow-worms; swiftly, strangely fair,
A bridge of lamps leaps through the air,
And hangs in night; and sudden shines
The long street's splendour-fretted lines.
Intense and bright that fiery bloom
Upon the bosom of the gloom;
At length the starry clusters fail,
Afar the lustrous crescents pale,
Till all the wondrous pageant dies
In gray light of damp-dawning skies.

High stands that lonely mountain ground
Above each babbling human sound;
Yet from its place afar it sees
Night scared by angry furnaces;
The lighting up of city proud,
The brightness o'er it in the cloud.
The foolish people never seek
Wise counsel from that silent peak,
Though from its height it looks abroad
All-seeing as the eye of God,
Haunting the peasant on the down,
The workman in the busy town;
Though from the closely-curtain'd dawn
The day is by the mountain drawn--
Whether the slant lines of the rain
Fill high the brook and shake the pane;
Or noonday reapers, wearied, halt
On sheaves beneath a blinding vault,
Unshaded by a vapour's fold--
Though from that mountain summit old
The cloudy thunder breaks and rolls,
Through deep reverberating souls;
Though from it comes the angry light,
Whose forky shiver scars the sight,
And rends the shrine from floor to dome,
And leaves the gods without a home.