Part 1

A SUMMER IN SKYE

BY ALEXANDER SMITH

AUTHOR OF "A LIFE DRAMA," ETC.

VOLUME II.

ALEXANDER STRAHAN, PUBLISHER 148 STRAND, LONDON 1865

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

THE LANDLORD'S WALK

ORBOST AND DUNVEGAN

DUNTULM

JOHN PENRUDDOCK

A SMOKING PARLIAMENT

THE EMIGRANTS

HOMEWARDS

GLASGOW

HOME

A SUMMER IN SKYE.

_THE LANDLORD'S WALK._

Walking into the interior of Skye is like walking into antiquity; the present is behind you, your face is turned toward Ossian. In the quiet silent wilderness you think of London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, or whatever great city it may be given you to live and work in, as of something of which you were cognisant in a former existence. Not only do you breathe the air of antiquity; but everything about you is a veritable antique. The hut by the road-side, thatched with turfs, smoke issuing from the roof, is a specimen of one of the oldest styles of architecture in the world. The crooked spade with which the crofter turns over the sour ground carries you away into fable. You remove a pile of stones on the moor, and you come to a flagged chamber in which there is a handful of human bones--whose, no one can tell. Duntulm and Dunsciach moulder on their crags, but the song the passing milkmaid sings is older than they. You come upon old swords that were once bright and athirst for blood; old brooches that once clasped plaids; old churchyards with carvings of unknown knights on the tombs; and old men who seem to have inherited the years of the eagle or the crow. These human antiques are, in their way, more interesting than any other: they are the most precious objects of _virtu_ of which the island can boast. And at times, if you can keep ear and eye open, you stumble on forms of life, relations of master and servant, which are as old as the castle on the crag or the cairn of the chief on the moor. Cash payment is not the "sole nexus between man and man." In these remote regions your servants' affection for you is hereditary as their family name or their family ornaments; your foster-brother would die willingly for you; and if your nurse had the writing of your epitaph, you would be the bravest, strongest, handsomest man that ever walked in shoe leather or out of it.

[Sidenote: Mr M'Ian's house]

The house of my friend Mr M'Ian is set down on the shore of one of the great Lochs that intersect the island; and as it was built in smuggling times, its windows look straight down the Loch towards the open sea. Consequently at night, when lighted up, it served all the purposes of a lighthouse: and the candle in the porch window, I am told, has often been anxiously watched by the rough crew engaged in running a cargo of claret or brandy from Bordeaux. Right opposite, on the other side of the Loch, is the great rugged fringe of the Cuchullin hills; and lying on the dry summer grass you can see it, under the influence of light and shade, change almost as the expression of a human face changes. Behind the house the ground is rough and broken, every hollow filled, every knoll plumaged with birches, and between the leafy islands, during the day, rabbits scud continually, and in the evening they sit in the glades and wash their innocent faces. A mile or two back from the house a glen opens into soft green meadows, through which a stream flows; and on these meadows Mr M'Ian, when the weather permits, cuts and secures his hay. The stream is quiet enough usually, but after a heavy day's rain, or when a waterspout has burst up among the hills, it comes down with a vengeance, carrying everything before it. On such occasions its roar may be heard a mile away. [Sidenote: View from the bridge.] About a pistol-shot from the house the river is crossed by a plank bridge, and in fine weather it is a great pleasure to sit down there and look about one. The stream flows sluggishly over rocks, in the deep places of a purple or port-wine colour, and lo! behind you, through the arch, slips a sunbeam, and just beneath the eye there gleams a sudden chasm of brilliant amber. The sea is at ebb, and the shore is covered with stones and dark masses of sea-weed; and the rocks a hundred yards off--in their hollows they hold pools of clear sea-water in which you can find curious and delicately-coloured ocean blooms--are covered with orange lichens, which contrast charmingly with the masses of tawny dulse and the stone-littered shore on the one side, and the keen blue of the sea on the other. Beyond the blue of the sea the great hills rise, with a radiant vapour flowing over their crests. Immediately to the left a spur of high ground runs out to the sea edge,--the flat top smooth and green as a billiard table, the sheep feeding on it white as billiard balls,--and at the foot of this spur of rock a number of huts are collected. They are half lost in an azure veil of smoke, you smell the peculiar odour of peat reek, you see the nets lying out on the grass to dry, you hear the voices of children. Immediately above, and behind the huts and the spur of high ground, the hill falls back, the whole breast of it shaggy with birch-wood; and just at the top you see a clearing and a streak of white stony road, leading into some other region as solitary and beautiful as the one in which you at present are. And while you sit on the bridge in a state of half-sleepy contentment--a bee nuzzling in a bell-shaped flower within reach of your stick, the sea-gulls dancing silent quadrilles overhead, the white lightning flash of a rabbit from copse to copse twenty yards off--you hear a sharp whistle, then a shout, and looking round there is M'Ian himself standing on a height, his figure clear against the sky: and immediately the men tinkering the boat on the shore drop work and stand and stare, and out of the smoke that wraps the cottages rushes bonnetless, Lachlan Dhu, or Donald Roy, scattering a brood of poultry in his haste, and marvelling much what has moved his master to such unwonted exertion.

My friend's white house is a solitary one, no other dwelling of the same kind being within eight miles of it. In winter, wind and rain beat it with a special spite; and the thunder of the sea creeps into your sleeping ears, and your dreams are of breakers and reefs, and ships going to pieces, and the cries of drowning men. In summer, it basks as contentedly on its green knoll; green grass, with the daisy wagging its head in the soft wind, runs up to the very door of the porch. But although solitary enough--so solitary; that if you are asked to dine with your nearest neighbour you must mount and ride--there are many more huts about than those we have seen nestling on the shore beneath the smooth green plateau on which sheep are feeding. If you walk along to the west,--and a rough path it is, for your course is over broken boulders,--you come on a little bay with an eagle's nest of a castle perched on a cliff, and there you will find a school-house and a half-a-dozen huts, the blue smoke steaming out of the crannies in the walls and roofs. Dark pyramids of peat are standing about, sheep and cows are feeding on the bits of pasture, gulls are weaving their eternal dances above, and during the day the school-room is murmuring like a beehive--only a much less pleasant task than the making of honey is going on within. [Sidenote: The pensioner.] Behind the house to the east, hidden by the broken ground and the masses of birch-wood, is another collection of huts; and in one of these lives the most interesting man in the place. He is an old pensioner, who has seen service in different quarters of the world; and frequently have I carried him a string of pigtail, and shared his glass of usquebaugh, and heard him, as he sat on a stone in the sunshine, tell tales of barrack life in Jamaica; of woody wildernesses filled with gorgeous undergrowth, of parasites that climbed like fluttering tongues of fire, and of the noisy towns of monkeys and parrots in the upper branches. I have heard him also severely critical on the different varieties of rum. Of every fiery compound he had a catholic appreciation, but rum was his special favourite--being to him what a Greek text was to Person, or an old master to Sir George Beaumont. So that you see, although Mr M'Ian's house was in a sense solitary, yet it was not altogether bereaved of the sight and sense of human habitations. On the farm there were existing perhaps, women and children included, some sixty souls; and to these the relation of the master was peculiar, and perhaps without a parallel in the island.

[Sidenote: Rude courts of justice.]

When, nearly half-a-century ago, Mr M'Ian left the army and became tacksman, he found cotters on his farm, and thought their presence as much a matter of course as that limpets should be found upon his rocks. They had their huts, for which they paid no rent; they had their patches of corn and potato ground, for which they paid no rent. There they had always been, and there, so far as Mr M'Ian was concerned, they would remain. He had his own code of generous old-fashioned ethics, to which he steadily adhered; and the man who was hard on the poor, who would dream of driving them from the places in which they were born, seemed to him to break the entire round of the Commandments. Consequently the huts still smoked on the hem of the shore and among the clumps of birch-wood. The children who played on the green when he first became tacksman grew up in process of time, and married; and on these occasions he not only sent them something on which to make merry withal, but he gave them--what they valued more--his personal presence; and he made it a point of honour, when the ceremony was over, to dance the first reel with the bride. When old men or children were sick, cordials and medicines were sent from the house; when old man or child died, Mr M'Ian never failed to attend the funeral. He was a Justice of the Peace; and when disputes arose amongst his own cotters, or amongst the cotters of others--when, for instance, Katy M'Lure accused Effie M'Kean of stealing potatoes; when Red Donald raged against Black Peter on some matter relating to the sale of a dozen lambs; when Mary, in her anger at the loss of her sweetheart, accused Betty (to whom said sweetheart had transferred his allegiance) of the most flagrant breaches of morality--the contending parties were sure to come before my friend; and many a rude court of justice I have seen him hold at the door of his porch. Arguments were heard _pro_ and _con_, witnesses were examined, evidence was duly sifted and weighed, judgment was made, and the case dismissed; and I believe these decisions gave in the long run as much satisfaction as those delivered in Westminster or the Edinburgh Parliament-House. Occasionally, too, a single girl or shepherd, with whose character liberties were being taken, would be found standing at the porch-door anxious to make oath that they were innocent of the guilt or the impropriety laid to their charge. Mr M'Ian would come out and hear the story, make the party assert his or her innocence on oath, and deliver a written certificate to the effect that in his presence, on such and such a day, so and so had sworn that certain charges were unfounded, false, and malicious. Armed with this certificate, the aspersed girl or shepherd would depart in triumph. He or she had passed through the ordeal by oath, and nothing could touch them farther.

[Sidenote: Mr M'Ian's cotters.]

Mr M'Ian paid rent for the entire farm; but to him the cotters paid no rent, either for their huts or for their patches of corn and potato ground. But the cotters were by no means merely pensioners--taking, and giving nothing in return. The most active of the girls were maids of various degree in Mr M'Ian's house; the cleverest and strongest of the lads acted as shepherds, &c.; and these of course received wages. The grown men amongst the cotters were generally at work in the south, or engaged in fishing expeditions, during summer; so that the permanent residents on the farm were chiefly composed of old men, women, and children. When required, Mr M'Ian demands the services of these people just as he would the services of his household servants, and they comply quite as readily. If the crows are to be kept out of the corn, or the cows out of the turnip-field, an urchin is remorselessly reft away from his games and companions. If a boat is out of repair, old Dugald is deputed to the job, and when his task is completed, he is rewarded with ten minutes' chat and a glass of spirits up at the house. When fine weather comes, every man, woman, and child is ordered to the hay-field, and Mr M'Ian potters amongst them the whole day, and takes care that no one shirks his duty. When his corn or barley is ripe the cotters cut it, and when the harvest operations are completed, he gives the entire cotter population a dance and harvest-home. But between Mr M'Ian and his cotters no money passes; by a tacit understanding he is to give them house, corn-ground, potato-ground, and they are to remunerate him with labour.

[Sidenote: Mr M'Ian's old-fashioned speech.]

Mr M'Ian, it will be seen, is a conservative, and hates change; and the social system by which he is surrounded wears an ancient and patriarchal aspect to a modern eye. It is a remnant of the system of clanship. The relation of cotter and tacksman, which I have described, is a bit of antiquity quite as interesting as the old castle on the crag--nay, more interesting, because we value the old castle mainly in virtue of its representing an ancient form of life, and here is yet lingering a fragment of the ancient form of life itself. You dig up an ancient tool or weapon in a moor, and place it carefully in a museum: here, as it were, is the ancient tool or weapon in actual use. No doubt Mr M'Ian's system has grave defects: it perpetuates comparative wretchedness on the part of the cotters, it paralyses personal exertion, it begets an ignoble contentment; but on the other hand it sweetens sordid conditions, so far as they can be sweetened, by kindliness and good services. If Mr M'Ian's system is bad, he makes the best of it, and draws as much comfort and satisfaction out of it, both for himself and for others, as is perhaps possible. Mr M'Ian's speech was as old-fashioned as he was himself; ancient matters turned up on his tongue just as ancient matters turned up on his farm. You found an old grave or an old implement on the one, you found an old proverb or an old scrap of a Gaelic poem on the other. After staying with him some ten days, I intimated my intention of paying a visit to my friend the Landlord--with whom Fellowes was then staying--who lived some forty miles off in the north-western portion of the island. The old gentleman was opposed to rapid decisions and movements, and asked me to remain with him yet another week. When he found I was resolute he glanced at the weather-gleam, and the troops of mists gathering on Cuchullin, muttering as he did so, "'Make ready my galley,' said the king, 'I shall sail for Norway on Wednesday.' 'Will you,' said the wind, who, flying about, had overheard what was said, 'you had better ask my leave first.'"

[Sidenote: The Landlord.]

Between the Landlord and M'Ian there were many likenesses and divergences. Both were Skyemen by birth, both had the strongest love for their native island, both had the management of human beings, both had shrewd heads, and hearts of the kindest texture. But at this point the likenesses ended, and the divergences began. Mr M'Ian had never been out of the three kingdoms. The Landlord had spent the best part of his life in India, was more familiar with huts of ryots, topes of palms, tanks in which the indigo plant was steeping, than with the houses of Skye cotters and the processes of sheep-farming. He knew the streets of Benares or Delhi better than he knew the streets of London; and, when he first came home, Hindostanee would occasionally jostle Gaelic on his tongue. The Landlord too, was rich, would have been considered a rich man even in the southern cities; he was owner of many a mile of moorland, and the tides of more than one far-winding Loch rose and rippled on shores that called him master. In my friend the Landlord there was a sort of contrariety, a sort of mixture or blending of opposite elements which was not without its fascination. He was in some respects a resident in two worlds. He liked motion; he had a magnificent scorn of distance: to him the world seemed comparatively small; and he would start from Skye to India with as much composure as other men would take the night train to London. He paid taxes in India and he paid taxes in Skye. His name was as powerful in the markets of Calcutta as it was at the Muir of Ord. He read the _Hurkaru_ and the _Inverness Courier_. He had known the graceful salaam of the East, as he now knew the touched bonnets of his shepherds. And in living with him, in talking with him, one was now reminded of the green western island on which sheep fed, anon of tropic heats, of pearl and gold, of mosque and pinnacle glittering above belts of palm-trees. In his company you were in imagination travelling backwards and forwards. You made the overland route twenty times a day. Now you heard the bagpipe, now the monotonous beat of the tom-tom and the keen clash of silver cymbals. You were continually passing backwards and forwards, as I have said. You were in the West with your half-glass of bitters in the morning, you were in the East with the curry at dinner. Both Mr M'Ian and the Landlord had the management of human beings, but their methods of management were totally different. Mr M'Ian accepted matters as he found them, and originating nothing, changing nothing, contrived to make life for himself and others as pleasant as possible. The Landlord, when he entered on the direction of his property, exploded every ancient form of usage, actually _ruled_ his tenants; would permit no factor, middle-man, or go-between; met them face to face, and had it out with them. The consequence was that the poor people were at times sorely bewildered. They received their orders and carried them out, with but little sense of the ultimate purpose of the Landlord--just as the sailor, ignorant of the principles of navigation, pulls ropes and reefs sails and does not discover that he gains much thereby, the same sea-crescent being around him day by day, but in due time a cloud rises on the horizon, and he is in port at last.

[Sidenote: The waterspout.]

As M'Ian had predicted, I could only move from his house if the weather granted permission; and this permission the weather did not seem disposed to grant. For several days it rained as I had never seen it rain before; a waterspout, too, had burst up among the hills, and the stream came down in mighty flood. There was great hubbub at the house. Mr M'Ian's hay, which was built in large stacks in the valley meadows, was in danger, and the fiery cross was sent through the cotters. Up to the hay-fields every available man was despatched with carts and horses, to remove the stacks to some spot where the waters could not reach them; while at the bridge nearer the house women and boys were stationed with long poles, and what rudely-extemporised implements Celtic ingenuity could suggest, to intercept and fish out piles and trusses which the thievish stream was carrying away with it seaward. These piles and trusses would at least serve for the bedding of cattle. For three days the rainy tempest continued; at last, on the fourth, mist and rain rolled up like a vast curtain in heaven, and then again were visible the clumps of birch-wood, and the bright sea and the smoking hills, and far away on the ocean floor Rum and Canna, without a speck of cloud on them, sleeping in the coloured calmness of early afternoon. This uprising of the elemental curtain was, so far as the suddenness of the effect was concerned, like the uprising of the curtain of the pantomime on the transformation scene--all at once a dingy, sodden world had become a brilliant one, and all the newly-revealed colour and brilliancy promised to be permanent.

[Sidenote: The farm of Knock.]