Part 11

"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.]