ORBOST AND DUNVEGAN.
Punctually at nine next morning there was a grating of wheels on the gravel, and Malcolm and his dog-cart were at the door. After a little delay I took my place on the vehicle and we drove off. Malcolm was a thick-set, good-humoured, red haired and whiskered little fellow, who could be silent for half a day if needed, but who could speak, and speak to the point, too, when required. When driving, and especially when the chestnut mare exhibited any diminution of speed, he kept up a running fire of ejaculations. "Go on," he would say, as he shook the reins, for the whip he mercifully spared, "what are you thinking about?" "Hoots! chit, chit, chit! I'm ashamed of you!" "Now then. Hoots!" and these reproaches seemed to touch the mare's heart, for at every ejaculation she made a dash forward as if the whip had touched her.
View from the dog-cart
On the way from Grishornish to Dunvegan, about a couple of miles from the latter place, a road branches off to the right and runs away downward through the heathery waste; and about forty yards onward you come to a bridge spanning a gully, and into this gully three streams leap and become one, and then the sole stream flows also to the right with shallow fall and brawling rapid, the companion of the descending road. The road up to the bridge is steep, but it is steeper beyond, and at the bridge Malcolm jumped down and walked alongside with the reins in his hands. In the slow progression your eye naturally follows the road and the stream; and beyond the flank of a hill sloping gradually down to the purple gloom of undulating moorland, you catch a glimpse of a bit of blue sea, some white broken cliffs that drop down into it; and, leaning on these cliffs, a great green sunny strath, with a white dot of a house upon it. The glimpse of sea, and white cliffs, and stretch of sunny greenness is pleasant; the hill, which you have yet to climb, keeps the sun from you, and all around are low heathery eminences. You stare at the far-off sunlit greenness, and having satisfied yourself therewith, begin to examine the ground above and on either side of the bridge, and find it possessed of much pastoral richness and variety. The main portion is covered with heather, but near you there are clumps of ferns, and further back are soft banks and platforms of verdure on which kine might browse and ruminate, and which only require the gilding of sunshine to make them beautiful. "What bridge is this?" I asked of Malcolm, who was still trudging alongside with the reins in his hand. "The Fairy Bridge"—and then I was told that the fairy sits at sunset on the green knolls and platforms of pasture chirming and singing songs to the cows; and that when a traveller crosses the bridge, and toils up the hill, she is sure to accompany him. As this was our own course, I asked, "Is the fairy often seen now?" "Not often. It's the old people who know about her. The shepherds sometimes hear her singing when they are coming down the hill; and years ago, a pedlar was found lying across the road up there dead; and it was thought that the fairy had walked along with him. But, indeed, I never saw or heard her myself—only that is what the old people say." And so in a modern dog-cart you are slowly passing through one of the haunted places in Skye!
The spoiling of the dikes.
I fancy Malcolm must have seen that this kind of talk interested me. "Did you ever hear, sir, about the Battle of the Spoiling of the Dikes down at Trompon Kirk, yonder?" and he pointed with his whip to the yellow-green strath which broke down in cliffs to the sea.
I answered that I never had, and Malcolm's narrative flowed on at once.
"You see, sir, there was a feud between the Macdonalds of the Mainland and the Macleods of Trotternish; and one Sunday, when the Macleods were in church, the Macdonalds came at full of tide, unknown to any one, and fastened their boats to the arched rocks on the shore—for it's a strange coast down there, full of caves and natural bridges and arches. Well, after they had fastened their boats, they surrounded the church, secured the door, and set it on fire. Every one was burned that Sunday except one woman, who squeezed herself through a window—it was so narrow that she left one of her breasts behind her—and escaped carrying the news. She raised the country with her crying and the sight of her bloody clothes. The people—although it was Sunday—rose, men and women, and came down to the burning church, and there the battle began. The men of Macleod's country fought, and the women picked up the blunted arrows, sharpened them on the stones, and then gave them to the men. The Macdonalds were beaten at last, and made for their boats. But by this time it was ebb of tide; and what did they see but the boats in which they had come, and which they had fastened to the rocky arches, hanging in the air! Like an otter, when its retreat to the sea is cut off, the Macdonalds turned on the men of Macleod's country and fought till the last of them fell, and in the sheughs of the sand their blood was running down red into the sea. At that time the tide came further in than it does now, and the people had built a turf dike to keep it back from their crops. Then they took the bodies of the Macdonalds and laid them down side by side at the foot of the dike, and tumbled it over on the top of them. That was the way they were buried. And after they had tumbled the dike they were vexed, for they minded then that the sea might come in and destroy their crops. That's the reason that the battle is called the Battle of the Spoiled Dikes."
"The men of Macleod's country would regret the spoiling of the dikes, as Bruce the battle-axe with which, on the evening before Bannockburn, and in the seeing of both armies, he cracked the skull of the English knight who came charging down upon him."
The Sciur of Eig.
Undiverted by my remark, Malcolm went on, "Maybe, sir, you have seen the Sciur of Eig as you came past in the steamer?"
"Yes, and I know the story. The Macdonalds were cooped up in a cave, and the Macleods ranged over the island and could find no trace of them. They then in high dudgeon returned to their boats, meaning to depart next morning. There was a heavy fall of snow during the night, was there not? and just when the Macleods were about to sail, the figure of a man, who had come out to see if the invaders were gone, was discerned on the top of the Sciur, against the sky line. The Macleods returned, and by the foot-prints in the snow they tracked the man to his hiding-place. They then heaped up heath and what timber they could procure, at the mouth of the cave, applied fire, and suffocated all who had therein taken shelter. Is that not it?"
"The Macdonalds first burned the church at Trompon down there. The bones of the Macdonalds are lying in the cave to this day, they say. I should like to see them."
"But don't you think it was a dreadful revenge? Eig was one of the safe places of the Macdonalds; and the people in the cave were chiefly old men, women, and children. Don't you think it was a very barbarous act, Malcolm?"
"I don't know," said Malcolm; "I am a Macleod myself."
Macleod's Tables.
By the time I had heard the story of Lady Grange, who sleeps in the Trompon churchyard, we had toiled pretty well up the steep ascent. On our way we heard no fairy singing to the kine, nor did any unearthly figure accompany us. Perhaps the witchery of the setting sun was needed. By the time we reached the top of the hill the pyramidical forms of Macleod's Tables were distinctly visible, and then Malcolm took his seat beside me in the dog-cart.
Macleod's Tables, two hills as high as Arthur's Seat, flat at the top as any dining-table in the country—from which peculiar conformation indeed they draw their names—and covered deep into spring by a table-cloth of snow; Macleod's Maidens, three spires of rock rising sheer out of the sea, shaped like women, around whose feet the foamy wreaths are continually forming, fleeting, and disappearing—what magic in the names of rocky spire and flat-topped hill to him who bears the name of Macleod, and who can call them his own! What is modern wealth—association-less, without poetry, melting like snow in the hot hand of a spendthrift—compared to that old inheritance of land, which is patent to the eye, which bears your name, around which legends gather,—all vital to you as your great-grandmother's blue eyes and fair hair; as your great-grandfather's hot temper and the corrugation of his forehead when he frowned! These bold landmarks of family possession must be regarded with peculiar interest by the family. They make the white sheet on which you—a shadow of fifty years or thereby—are projected by the camera obscura of fate. The Tables and the Maidens remain for ever bearing your name, while you—the individual Macleod—are as transitory as the mist wreath of the morning which melts on the one, or the momentary shape of wind-blown foam which perishes on the base of the other. The value of these things is spiritual, and cannot be affected by the click of the auctioneer's hammer, or the running of the hour-glass sand on the lawyer's table after the title-deeds have been read and the bids are being made. Wealth is mighty, but it can no more buy these things than it can buy love, or reverence, or piety. Jones may buy the Tables and the Maidens, but they do not own him; he is for ever an alien: they wear the ancient name, they dream the ancient dream. When poverty has stripped your livery from all your servants, they remain faithful. When an Airlie is about to die, with tuck of drum, they say, a ghostly soldier marches round the castle. Rothschild, with all his millions, could not buy that drummer's services. What is the use of buying an estate to-day? It is never wholly yours; the old owner holds part possession with you. It is like marrying a widow; you hold her heart, but you hold it in partnership with the dead. I should rather be the plainest English yeoman whose family has been in possession of a farm since the Heptarchy than be the richest banker in Europe. The majority of men are like Arabs, their tents are pitched here to-night and struck to-morrow. Those families only who have held lands for centuries can claim an abiding home. In such families there is a noble sense of continuity, of the unbroken onflowing of life. The pictures and the furniture speak of forefather and foremother. Your ancestor's name is on your books, and you see the pencil marks which he has placed against the passages that pleased him. The necklace your daughter wears heaved on the breast of the ancestress from whom she draws her smile and her eyes. The rookery that caws to-night in the sober sunset cawed in the ears of the representative of your house some half-dozen generations back—the very same in every respect, 'tis the individual rooks only that have changed. The full-foliaged murmur of the woods shape your name, and yours only. As for these Macleods—
The house at Orbost.
"That's Orbost, sir, the house under the hill," said Malcolm, pointing with his whip, and obviously tired of the prolonged silence, "and yonder on the left are the Cuchullins. The sea is down there, but you cannot see it from this. We'll be there in half an hour," and exactly in half an hour, with Macleod's Tables behind us, we passed the garden and the offices, and alighted on the daisied sward before the house.
After I had wandered about for an hour I made up my mind that, had I the choice, I should rather live at Orbost than at any other house in Skye. And yet, at Orbost, the house itself is the only thing that can reasonably be objected to. In the first place, it is one of those elegant expressionless houses in the Italian style with which one is familiar in the suburban districts of large cities, and as such it is quite out of keeping with the scenery and the spiritual atmosphere of the island. It is too modern, and villa like. It is as innocent of a legend as Pall Mall. It does not believe in ghost stories. It has a dandified and sceptical look; and as it has not taken to the island, the island has not taken to it. Around it trees have not grown well; they are mere stunted trunks, bare, hoary, wind-writhen. There is not a lichen or discoloration on its smoothly-chiselled walls; not a single chimney or gable has been shrouded with affectionate ivy. It looks like a house which has "cut" the locality, and which the locality has "cut" in return. In the second place, the house is stupidly situated. It turns a cold shoulder on the grand broken coast; on the ten miles of sparkling sea on which the sun is showering millions of silver coins, ever a new shower as the last one disappears; on Rum, with a veil of haze on its highest peak; on the lyrical Cuchullins—for although of the rigidest granite, they always give one the idea of passion and tumult; on the wild headlands of Bracadale, fading one after another, dimmer and dimmer, into distance;—on all this the house turns a cold shoulder, and on a meadow on which some dozen colts are feeding, and on a low strip of moory hill beyond, from which the cotters draw their peats, it stares intently with all its doors and windows. Right about face. Attention! That done, the most fastidious could object to nothing at Orbost, on the point of beauty at least. The faces of the Skye people, continually set like flints against assaults of wind and rain, are all lined and puckered about the eyes; and in Skye houses you naturally wish to see something of the same weather-beaten look. Orbost, with its smooth front and unwinking windows, outrages the fitness of things.
Of the interior no one can complain; for on entering you are at once surrounded by a proper antiquity and venerableness. The dining-room is large and somewhat insufficiently lighted, and on the walls hang two of Raeburn's half-lengths—the possession of which are in themselves vouchers of a family's respectability—and several portraits of ladies with obsolete waists and head-dresses, and military gentlemen in the uniform of last century. The furniture is dark and massy; the mahogany drawing depth and colour from age and usage; the carpet has been worn so bare that the pattern has become nearly obliterated. The room was not tidy, I was pleased to see. A small table placed near the window was covered with a litter of papers; in one corner were guns and fishing-rods, and a fishing-basket laid near them on the floor; and the round dusty mirror above the mantelpiece—which had the curious faculty of reducing your size, so that in its depth you saw yourself as it were at a considerable distance—had spills of paper stuck between its gilded frame and the wall. From these spills of paper I concluded that the house was the abode of a bachelor who occasionally smoked after dinner—which, indeed, was the case, only the master of the house was from home at the time of my visit. In the drawing-room, across the lobby, hooped ladies of Queen Anne's time might have sat and drunk tea out of the tiniest china cups. The furniture was elegant, but it was the elegance of an ancient beau. The draperies were rich, but they had lost colour, like a spinster's cheek. In a corner stood a buffet with specimens of cracked china. Curious Indian ornaments, and a volume of Clarissa Harlowe, and another volume of the Poetical Works of Mr Alexander Pope—the binding faded, the paper dim—lay on the central table. Had the last reader left them there? They reminded me of the lute—it may be seen at this day in Pompeii—which the dancing girl flung down in an idle moment. In a dusky corner a piano stood open, but the ivory keys had grown yellow, and all richness of voice had been knocked out of them by the fingerings of dead girls. I touched them, and heard the metallic complaint of ill-usage, of old age, of utter loneliness and neglect. I thought of Ossian, and the flight of the dark-brown years. It was the first time they had spoken for long. The room, too, seemed to be pervaded by a scent of withered rose leaves, but whether this odour lived in the sense or the imagination, it would be useless to inquire.
The garden at Orbost.
Orbost lies pleasantly to the sun, and in the garden I could almost fancy Malvolio walking cross-gartered—so trim it was, so sunnily sedate, so formal, so ancient-looking. The shadow on the dial told the age of the day, clipped box-wood ran along every walk. Trees, crucified to the warm brick walls, stretched out long arms on which fruit was ripening. The bee had stuck his head so deeply into a rose that he could hardly get it out again, and so with the leaves—as a millionaire with bank-notes—he impatiently buzzed and fidgeted. And then you were not without sharp senses of contrast: out of the sunny warmth and floral odours you lifted your eyes, and there were Macleod's Tables rising in an atmosphere of fable; and up in the wind above you, turning now and again its head in alert outlook, skimmed a snow-white gull, weary—as tailors sometimes are with sitting—of dancing on the surges of the sea.
Orbost stands high above the sea, and if you wish thoroughly to enjoy yourself you must walk down the avenue to the stone seat placed on the road which winds along the brow of the broken cliffs, and which, by many a curve and bend, reaches the water level at about a quarter of a mile's distance, where there is a boat-house, and boats lying keel uppermost or sideways, and a stretch of yellow sand on which the tide is flowing, creamy line after creamy line. From where you sit the ground breaks down first in a wall of cliff, then in huge boulders as big as churches, thereafter in bushy broken ground with huts perched in the coziest places, each hut swathed in the loveliest films of blue smoke; and all through this broken ground there are narrow winding paths along which a cow is always being gingerly driven, or a wild Indian-looking girl is bringing water from some cool spring beneath. Here you can quietly enjoy the expanse of dazzling sea, a single sail breaking the restless scintillations; far Rum asleep on the silver floor; and, caught at a curious angle, the Cuchullin hills—reminding you of some stranded iceberg, splintered, riven, many-ridged, which the sun in all his centuries has been unable to melt. In the present light they have a curiously hoary look, and you can notice that in the higher corries there are long streaks of snow. The glen at Orbost. On the right, beyond the boat-house, a great hill, dappled with brown and olive like a seal's back, and traversed here and there by rocky terraces, breaks in precipices down to the sea line; and between it and the hill on which you are sitting, and which slopes upward behind, you see the beginning of a deep glen, in its softness and greenness suggesting images of pastoral peace, the bringing home of rich pails by milkmaids, the lowing of cattle in sober ruddy sunsets. "What glen is that, Malcolm?" "Oh, sir, it just belongs to the farm." "Is there a house in it?" "No, but there's the ruins of a dozen." "How's that?" "Ye see, the old Macleods liked to keep their cousins and second cousins about them; and so Captain Macleod lived at the mouth of the glen, and Major Macleod at the top of it, and Colonel Macleod over the hill yonder. If the last trumpet had been blown at the end of the French war, no one but a Macleod would have risen out of the churchyard at Dunvegan. If you want to see a chief now-a-days, you must go to London for him. Ay, sir, Dun Kenneth's prophecy has come to pass—'In the days of Norman, son of the third Norman, there will be a noise in the doors of the people, and wailing in the house of the widow; and Macleod will not have so many gentlemen of his name as will row a five-oared boat around the Maidens!' The prophecy has come to pass, and the Tables are no longer Macleod's—at least one of them is not."
After wandering about Orbost we resumed our seats in the dog-cart, and drove to Dunvegan Castle.
As we drew near Dunvegan we came down on one of those sinuous sea-lochs which—hardly broader than a river—flow far inland, and carry mysteriousness of sight and sound, the gliding sail, the sea-bird beating high against the wind, to the door of the shepherd, who is half a sailor among his bleating flocks. Across the sea, and almost within hail of your voice, a farm and outhouses looked embattled against the sky. Along the shore, as we drove, were boats and nets, and here and there little clumps and knots of houses. People were moving about on the roads intent on business. We passed a church, a merchant's store, a post-office; we were plainly approaching some village of importance; and on the right hand the chestnuts, larches, and ashes which filled every hollow, and covered every rolling slope, gave sufficient indication that we were approaching the castle.
The garden at Dunvegan.
In the centre of these woods we turned up a narrow road to the right along which ran a wall, and stopped at a narrow postern door. Here Malcolm rang a bell—the modern convenience grating somewhat on my preconceived notions of an approach to the old keep; if he had blown a horn I daresay I should have felt better satisfied—and in due time we were admitted by a trim damsel. The bell was bad, but the brilliant garden into which we stepped was worse—soft level lawns, a huge star of geraniums, surrounded at proper distances by half-moons and crescents of calceolarias rimmed with lobelias. The garden was circled by a large wall, against which fruit-trees were trained. In thinking of Dunvegan my mind had unconsciously become filled with desolate and Ossianic images, piled and hoary rocks, the thistle waving its beard in the wind, flakes of sea spray flying over all—and behold I rang a bell as if I were in Regent Street, and by a neat damsel was admitted into a garden that would have done no discredit to Kensington! After passing through the garden we entered upon a space of wild woodland, containing some fine timber, and romance began to revive. Malcolm then led me to an outhouse, and pointed out a carved stone above the doorway, on which were quartered the arms of the Macleods and Macdonalds. "Look there," said he, "Macleod has built the stone into his barn which should have been above his fire-place in his dining-room."
"I see the bull's head of Macleod and the galley of Macdonald—were the families in any way connected?"
"Oftener by a bloody dirk than by a gold marriage ring. But with all their quarrellings they intermarried more than once. Dunvegan was originally a stronghold of the Macdonald."
"Indeed! and how did the Macleods get possession?"
The sinking of the barge.
"I'll tell you that," said Malcolm. "Macdonald of Dunvegan had no son, but his only daughter was married to Macleod of Harris, and a young chief was growing up in Macleod's castle. The Macdonalds, knowing that when the old man was dead, they would have no one to lead them to battle, were pondering whom they should elect as chief; and, at the same time, Macleod's lady was just as anxiously pondering by what means her son should sit in Dunvegan. Well, while all this thinking and scheming was going on secretly in Skye and Harris, Macdonald, wishing to visit Macleod, ordered his barge and rowers to be in readiness, and pushed off. Macleod, hearing that his father-in-law was coming, went out in his barge to meet him half-way, and to escort him to his castle with all honour. Macleod's barge was bigger and stronger than Macdonald's, and held a greater number of rowers; and while his men were pulling, the chief sat in the stern steering, and his wife sat by his side. When they got into mid-channel a heavy mist came down, but still the men pulled, and still Macleod steered. All at once Macleod found that he was running straight on his father-in-law's barge, and just when he had his hand on the helm to change the course and avoid striking, his wife gripped him hard and whispered in his ear, 'Macleod, Macleod, there's only that barge betwixt you and Dunvegan.' Macleod took the hint, steered straight on, struck and sunk Macdonald's barge in the mist, and sailed for Dunvegan, which he claimed in the name of his son. That is the way, as the old people tell, that Macleod came into possession here."
Then we strolled along the undulating paths, and at a sudden turn there was the ancient keep on its rock, a stream brawling down close at hand, the tide far withdrawn, the long shore heaped with dulse and tangle, and the sea-mews above the flag-staff, as the jackdaws fly above the cathedral towers in England. It was gray as the rock on which it stood—there were dark tapestries of ivy on the walls, but at a first glance it was disappointingly modern-looking. I thought of the mighty shell of Tantallon looking towards the Bass, and waving a matted beard of lichens in the sea wind, and began to draw disadvantageous comparisons. The feeling was foolishness, and on a better acquaintance with the building it wore off. Dunvegan is inhabited, and you cannot have well-aired sheets, a well-cooked dinner, and the venerableness of ruin. Comfort and decay are never companions.
Dunvegan.
Dunvegan reminds one of a fragment of an old ballad, encumbered with a modern editor's introductory chapter, historical disquisitions, critical comments, explanatory and illustrative notes, and glossarial index. The dozen or so of rude stanzas—a whole remote passionate world dwelling in them as in some wizard's mirror—is by far the most valuable portion of the volume, although, in point of bulk, it bears no proportion to the subsidiary matter which has grown around it. Dunvegan is perhaps the oldest inhabited building in the country, but the ancient part is of small extent. One portion of it, it is said, was built in the ninth century. A tower was added in the fifteenth, another portion in the sixteenth, and the remainder by different hands, and at irregular intervals since then. No inconsiderable portion is unquestionably modern. The old part of the castle looks toward the sea, and entrance is obtained by a steep and narrow archway—up which, perhaps, came Macleod of Harris after he sunk the barge of his father-in-law in the misty Minch. In a crevice in the wall, which forms one side of this entrance, a well was recently discovered; it had been built up—no man knows for how long—and when tasted, the water was found perfectly sweet and pure. In the old days of strife and broil it may have cooled many a throat thirsty with siege. The most modern portion of the building, I should fancy, is the present frontage, which, as you approach it by the bridge which solidly fills up the ravine, is not without a certain grandeur and nobility of aspect. The rock on which the castle stands is surrounded on three sides by the sea; and fine as the old pile looked at ebb of tide, one could fancy how much its appearance would be improved with all that far-stretching ugliness of sand and tangle obliterated, and the rock swathed with the azure and silence of ocean. To sleep in a bed-room at Dunvegan in such circumstances, must be like sleeping in a bed-room in fairy-land. You might hear a mermaid singing beneath your window, and looking out into the moonlight, behold, rising from the glistening swells, the perilous beauty of her breasts and hair.
The Macleod portraits.
After viewing the castle from various points, we boldly advanced across the bridge and rang the bell. After waiting some little time, we were admitted by a man who—the family at the time being from home—seemed the only person in possession. He was extremely polite, volunteered to show us all over the place, and regretted that in the prolonged absence of his master the carpets and furniture in the "drawing-room" had been lifted. The familiar English patois sounded strange in the castle of a Macleod! On his invitation we entered an unfurnished hall with galleries running to left and right, and on the wooden balustrades of one of these galleries the great banner of Macleod was dispread—a huge white sheet on which the arms and legend of the house were worked in crimson. Going up stairs, we passed through spacious suites of rooms, carpetless, and with the furniture piled up in the centre and covered with an awning—through every window obtaining a glimpse of blue Loch and wild Skye headland. In most cases in the rooms the family pictures were left hanging, some fine, others sorry daubs enough, yet all interesting as suggesting the unbroken flow of generations. Here was Rory More, who was knighted in the reign of James VI. Here was the Macdonald lady, whose marriage with the Macleod of that day was the occasion of the arms of the families being united on the sculptured stone which we saw built above the door of the barn outside. Here was a haughty-looking young man of twenty-five, and yonder the same man at sixty, grim, wrinkled, suspicious-looking—resembling the earlier portrait only in the pride of eye and lip. Here were Macleod beauties who married and became mothers in other houses; yonder were beauties from other castles who became mothers here, and grew gray-haired and died, leaving a reminiscence of their features in the family for a generation or two. Here was the wicked Macleod, yonder the spendthrift in whose hands the family wealth melted, and over there the brave soldier standing with outstretched arm, elephants and Indian temples forming an appropriate background. The rooms were spacious, every window affording a glorious sea view; but from their unfurnished and dismantled condition there arose a sort of Ossianic desolation, which comfortless as it must have been to a permanent dweller, did not fail to yield a certain gloomy pleasure to the imagination of the visitor of an hour.
The Macleod dungeons.
Passing up and down stairs in the more ancient portion of the castle, the man in possession showed us the dungeons in which the Macleods immured their prisoners. I had fancied that these would have been scooped out of the rock on which the castle stood. Whether such existed I cannot say; but by candle-light I peered into more than one stony closet let into the mighty wall—the entrance of which the garments of the lady must have swept every night as she went to bed—where the captured foemen of the family were confined. Perhaps the near contiguity of the prisoner, perhaps the sweeping of garments past the dungeon door, perhaps the chance-heard groan or clank of manacle, constituted the exquisite zest and flavour of revenge. Men keep their dearest treasures near them; and it might be that the neighbourhood of the wretch he hated—so near that the sound of revel could reach him at times—was more grateful to Macleod than his burial in some far-away vault, perhaps to be forgotten. Who knows! It is difficult to creep into the hearts of those old sea-kings. If I mistake not, one of the dungeons is at present used as a wine cellar. So the world and the fashion of it changes! Where the Macleod of three centuries ago kept his prisoner, the Macleod of to-day keeps his claret. From which of its uses the greatest amount of satisfaction has been derived would be a curious speculation.
The fairy room.
By a narrow spiral stair we reached the most interesting apartment in Dunvegan—the Fairy Room, in which Sir Walter Scott slept once. This apartment is situated in the ancient portion of the building, it overlooks the sea, and its walls are of enormous thickness. From its condition I should almost fancy that no one has slept there since Sir Walter's time. In it, at the period of my visit, there was neither bedstead nor chair, and it seemed a general lumber room. The walls were hung with rusty broadswords, dirks, targes, pistols, Indian helmets; and tunics of knitted steel were suspended on frames, but so rotten with age and neglect that a touch frayed them as if they had been woven of worsted. There were also curved scimitars, and curiously-hafted daggers, and two tattered regimental flags—that no doubt plunged through battle smoke in the front of charging lines—and these last I fancied had been brought home by the soldier whose portrait I had seen in one of the modern rooms. Moth-eaten volumes were scattered about amid a chaos of rusty weapons, cruses, and lamps. In one corner lay a huge oaken chest with a chain wound round it, but the lid was barely closed, and through the narrow aperture a roll of paper protruded docketed in clerkly and and with faded ink—accounts of —— from 1715 till some time at the close of the century—in which doubtless some curious items were imbedded. On everything lay the dust and neglect of years. The room itself was steeped in a half twilight. The merriest sunbeam became grave as it slanted across the corroded weapons in which there was no answering gleam. Cobwebs floated from the corners of the walls—the spiders which wove them having died long ago of sheer age. To my feeling it would be almost impossible to laugh in the haunted chamber, and if you did so you would be startled by a strange echo as if something mocked you. There was a grave-like odour in the apartment. You breathed dust and decay.
The fairy flag.
Seated on the wooden trunk round which the chain was wound, while Malcolm with his hand thrust in the hilt of a broadsword, was examining the notches on its blade, I inquired,
"Is there not a magic flag kept at Dunvegan? The flag was the gift of a fairy, if I remember the story rightly."
"Yes," said Malcolm, making a cut at an imaginary foeman, and then hanging the weapon up on the wall; "but it is kept in a glass case, and never shown to strangers, at least when the family is from home."
"How did Macleod come into possession of the flag, Malcolm?"
"Well, the old people say that one of the Macleods fell in love with a fairy, and used to meet her on the green hill out there. Macleod promised to marry her; and one night the fairy gave him a green flag, telling him that, when either he or one of his race was in distress, the flag was to be waved, and relief would be certain. Three times the flag might be waved; but after the third time it might be thrown into the fire, for the power would have gone all out of it. I don't know, indeed, how it was, but Macleod deserted the fairy and married a woman."
"Is there anything astonishing in that? Would you not rather marry a woman than a fairy yourself."
"Maybe, if she was a rich one like the woman Macleod married," said Malcolm with a grin. "But when the fairy heard of the marriage she was in a great rage whatever. She cast a spell over Macleod's country, and all the women brought forth dead sons, and all the cows brought forth dead calves. Macleod was in great tribulation. He would soon have no young men to fight his battles, and his tenants would soon have no milk or cheese wherewith to pay their rents. The cry of his people came to him as he sat in his castle, and he waved the flag, and next day over the country there were living sons and living calves. Another time, in the front of a battle, he was sorely pressed, and nigh being beaten, but he waved the flag again, and got the victory, and a great slaying of his enemies."
"Then the flag has not been waved for the third and last time?"
"No. At the time of the potato failure, when the people were starving in their cabins, it was thought that he should have waved it and stopped the rot. But the flag stayed in its case. Macleod can only wave it once now; and I'm sure he's like a man with his last guinea in his pocket—he does not like to spend it. But maybe, sir, you would like to climb up to the flag-staff and see the view."
We then left the haunted chamber, passed through the dismantled room in which the portraits hung, and ascended the narrow spiral stair—the walls of which, whether from sea damp, or from a peculiarity of the lime used in building, were covered with a glistering scurf of salt—and finally emerged on the battlemented plateau from which the flagstaff sprang. The huge mast had fallen a month or two previously, and was now spliced with rope and propped with billets of wood. A couple of days before the catastrophe, a young fellow from Cambridge, Malcolm told me, had climbed to the top—lucky for the young fellow it did not fall then, else he and Cambridge had parted company for ever. From our airy perch the outlook was wonderfully magnificent. From the breast of the hill which shut out everything in one direction, there rolled down on the castle billow on billow of many-coloured foliage. The garden through which we had passed an hour before was but a speck of bright colour. The little toy village sent up its pillars of smoke. There was the brown stony beach, the boats, the ranges of nets, the sinuous snake-like Loch, and the dark far-stretching promontories asleep on the sleekness of summer sea. With what loveliness of shining blue the sea flowed in everywhere, carrying silence and the foreign-looking bird into inland solitudes, girdling with its glory the rock on which the chief's castle had stood for ten centuries, and at the door of the shepherd's shealing calling on the brown children with the voices of many wavelets, to come down, and play with them on crescents of yellow sand!
Driving homeward I inquired, "Does the Laird live here much?" "No, indeed," said Malcolm; "he lives mainly in London."
Dunvegan.
And thereupon I thought how pleasant it must be for a man to escape from the hollow gusty castle with its fairy flag which has yet to be waved once, its dungeons, its haunted chambers, its large gaunt rooms, with portraits of men and women from whom he has drawn his blood, its traditions of revenge and crime—and take up his abode in some villa at breezy Hampstead, or classic Twickenham, or even in some half-suburban residence in the neighbourhood of Regent's Park. The villa at Hampstead or Twickenham is neat and trim, and when you enter on residence, you enter without previous associations. It is probably not so old as yourself. The walls and rooms are strange, but you know that you and they will become pleasantly acquainted by and by. Dark family faces do not lower upon you out of the past; the air of the room in which you sit is not tainted with the smell of blood spilt hundreds of years ago. You and your dwelling are not the sole custodiers of dreadful secrets. The shadows of the fire-light on the twilight walls do not take shapes that daunt and affright. Your ancestors no longer tyrannise over you. You escape from the gloomy past, and live in the light and the voices of to-day. You are yourself—you are no longer a link in a blood-crusted chain. You enter upon the enjoyment of your individuality, as you enter upon the enjoyment of a newly-inherited estate. In modern London you drink nepenthe, and Dunvegan is forgotten. Were I the possessor of a haunted, worm-eaten castle, around which strange stories float, I should fly from it as I would from a guilty conscience, and in the whirl of vivid life lose all thoughts of my ancestors. I should appeal to the present to protect me from the past. I should go into Parliament and study blue-books, and busy myself with the better regulation of alkali works, and the drainage of Stoke Pogis. No ancestor could touch me then.
Donald Gorm.
"It's a strange old place, Dunvegan," said Malcolm, as we drove down by the Fairy Bridge, "and many strange things have happened in it. Did you ever hear, sir, how Macdonald of Sleat—Donald Gorm, or Blue Donald, as he was called—stayed a night with Macleod of Dunvegan at a time when there was feud between them?"
"No: but I shall be glad to hear the story now."
"Well," Malcolm went on, "on a stormy winter evening, when the walls of Dunvegan were wet with the rain of the cloud and the spray of the sea, Macleod, before he sat down to dinner, went out to have a look at the weather. 'A giant's night is coming on, my men,' he said when he came in, 'and if Macdonald of Sleat were at the foot of my rock seeking a night's shelter, I don't think I could refuse it.' He then sat down in the torch-light at the top of the long table, with his gentlemen around him. When they were half through with their meal a man came in with the news that the barge of Macdonald of Sleat—which had been driven back by stress of weather on its way to Harris—was at the foot of the rock, and that Macdonald asked shelter for the night for himself and his men. 'They are welcome,' said Macleod; 'tell them to come in.' The man went away, and in a short time Macdonald, his piper, and his body guard of twelve, came in wet with the spray and rain, and weary with rowing. Now on the table there was a boar's head—which is always an omen of evil to a Macdonald—and noticing the dish, Donald Gorm with his men about him sat at the foot of the long table, beneath the salt, and away from Macleod and the gentlemen. Seeing this, Macleod made a place beside himself, and called out, 'Macdonald of Sleat, come and sit up here!' 'Thank you,' said Donald Gorm, 'I'll remain where I am; but remember that wherever Macdonald of Sleat sits that's the head of the table.' Donald Gorm's dirk. So when dinner was over the gentlemen began to talk about their exploits in hunting, and their deeds in battle, and to show each other their dirks. Macleod showed his, which was very handsome, and it was passed down the long table from gentleman to gentleman, each one admiring it and handing it to the next, till at last it came to Macdonald, who passed it on, saying nothing. Macleod noticed this, and called out, 'Why don't you show your dirk, Donald; I hear it's very fine?' Macdonald then drew his dirk, and holding it up in his right hand, called out, 'Here it is, Macleod of Dunvegan, and in the best hand for pushing it home in the four and twenty islands of the Hebrides.' Now Macleod was a strong man, but Macdonald was a stronger, and so Macleod could not call him a liar; but thinking he would be mentioned next, he said, 'And where is the next best hand for pushing a dirk home in the four and twenty islands?' 'Here,', cried Donald Gorm, holding up his dirk in his left hand, and brandishing it in Macleod's face, who sat amongst his gentlemen biting his lips with vexation. So when it came to bed-time, Macleod told Macdonald that he had prepared a chamber for him near his own, and that he had placed fresh heather in a barn for the piper and the body guard of twelve. Macdonald thanked Macleod, but remembering the boar's head on the table, said he would go with his men, and that he preferred for his couch the fresh heather to the down of the swan. 'Please yourself, Macdonald of Sleat,' said Macleod, as he turned on his heel.
Donald Gorm's threat.
"Now it so happened that one of the body guard of twelve had a sweetheart in the castle, but he had no opportunity of speaking to her. But once when she was passing the table with a dish she put her mouth to the man's ear and whispered, 'Bid your master beware of Macleod. The barn you sleep in will be red flame at midnight and ashes before the morning.' The words of the sweetheart passed the man's ear like a little breeze, but he kept the colour of his face, and looked as if he had heard nothing. So when Macdonald and his men got into the barn where the fresh heather had been spread for them to sleep on, he told the words which had been whispered in his ear. Donald Gorm then saw the trick that was being played, and led his men quietly out by the back door of the barn, down to a hollow rock which stood up against the wind, and there they sheltered themselves. By midnight the sea was red with the reflection of the burning barn, and morning broke on gray ashes and smouldering embers. The Macleods thought they had killed their enemies; but fancy their astonishment when Donald Gorm with his body guard of twelve marched past the castle down to the foot of the rock, where his barge was moored, with his piper playing in front—'Macleod, Macleod, Macleod of Dunvegan, I drove my dirk into your father's heart, and in payment of last night's hospitality I'll drive it to the hilt in his son's yet.'"
"Macleod of Dunvegan must have been a great rascal," said I; "and I hope he got his deserts."
"I don't know, indeed," said Malcolm; "but if Donald Gorm caught him he could hardly miss." He then added, as if in deprecation of the idea that any portion of ignominy was attachable to him, "I am not one of the Dunvegan Macleods; I come from the Macleods of Raasay."
DUNTULM.
A rainy day.
The Landlord's house had been enveloped for several days in misty rain. It did not pour straight down, it did not patter on door and window, it had no action as it has in the south,—which made it all the more tormenting, for in action there is always some sort of exhilaration; in any case you have the notion that it will wear itself out soon, that "it is too hot work to last long, Hardy." An immense quantity of moisture was held in the atmosphere, and it descended in a soft, silent, imperceptible drizzle. It did not seem so very bad when you looked out on it from the window, but if you ventured on the gravel you were wet to the skin in a trice. White damp vapours lay low on the hills across the Loch; white damp vapours lay on the rising grounds where the sheep fed; white damp vapours hid the tops of the larches which sheltered the house from the south-west winds. Heaven was a wet blanket, and everything felt its influence. During the whole day Maida lay dreaming on the rug before the fire. The melancholy parrot moped in its cage, and at intervals—for the sake of variety merely—attacked the lump of white sugar between the wires, or suspended itself, head downwards, and eyed you askance. The horses stamped and pawed in their stables. The drenched peacock, which but a few days before was never weary displaying his starry tail, read one a lesson on the instability of human glory. The desolate sea lapping the weedy piers of Tyre; Napoleon at St Helena, his innumerable armies, the thunders of his cannon that made capitals pale, faded away, perished utterly like a last year's dream, could not have been more impressive. It sat on the garden seat, a mere lump of draggled feathers, and as gray as a hedge-sparrow. The Landlord shut himself up in his own room, writing letters against the departure of the Indian mail. We read novels, and yawned, and made each other miserable with attempts at conversation—and still the clouds hung low on hill, and rising ground, and large plantation, like surcharged sponges; and still the drizzle came down mercilessly, noiselessly, until the world was sodden, and was rapidly becoming sponge-like too. On the fourth day we went upstairs, threw ourselves on our beds dead beat, and fell asleep, till we were roused by the gong for dinner. Thrusting my face hurriedly into a basin of cold water, tidying dishevelled locks, I got down when the soup was being taken away, and was a good deal laughed at. Somehow the spirits of the party seemed lighter; the despotism of rain did not weigh so heavily on them; I felt almost sportively inclined myself; and just at the conclusion of dessert, when wine had circulated once or twice, there was a flush of rosy light on the panes. I went at once to the window, and there was the sun raying out great lances of splendour, and armies of fiery mists lifting from the hills and streaming upwards, glorious as seraph bands, or the transfigured spirits of martyrdom. The westward-ebbing loch was sleek gold, the wet trees twinkled, every puddle was sun-gilt. I looked at the barometer and saw the mercury rising like hope in a man's breast when fortune smiles on him. The curtains were drawn back to let the red light fully into the room. "I like to see that fiery smoke on the hills," said the Landlord, "it's always a sign of fine weather setting in. Now it won't do for you fellows to lie up here like beached boats doing nothing. You must be off after tiffin to-morrow. I'll give you letters of introduction, a dog-cart and a man, and in a week or so come back and tell me what you think of Duntulm and Quirang. You must rough it you know. You mustn't be afraid of a shower, or of getting your feet wetted in a bog."
Departure from the Landlord's.
And so next day after tiffin the Landlord sent us off into the wilds, as a falconer might toss his hawk into the air.
The day was fine, the heat was tempered by a pleasant breeze, great white clouds swam in the blue void, and every now and again a shower came racing across our path with a sunbeam at its heel. We drove past the village, past the huts that ran along the top of the cultivated hill-side, dropped down on Skeabost, and the stream with the island of graves, and in due time reached the solitary school-house at the junction of the roads. Turning to the left here, we drove along the east shore of Loch Snizort, up stages of easy ascent, and then, some four or five miles on, left the Parliamentary Road and descended on Kingsburgh. I pointed out to Fellowes the ruins of the old house, spoke to him of the Prince, Flora Macdonald, Dr Johnson, and Boswell. After sauntering about there for a quarter of an hour, we walked down to the present house with its gables draped with ivies, and its pleasant doors and windows scented with roses and honey-suckles. To the gentleman who then occupied the farm we bore a letter from the Landlord, but, on inquiring, found that he had gone south on business a couple of days previously. Kingsburgh. This gentleman was a bachelor, the house was tenanted by servants only, and of course at Kingsburgh we could not remain. This was a disappointment; and as we walked back to the dog-cart, I told my companion of a pleasant ten days I had wasted there three or four summers since. I spoke to him of the Kingsburgh of that time—the kindly generous Christian Highland gentleman; of his open door and frank greeting, warm and hospitable; of his Christianity, as open and hospitable as his door; of the plenteous meats and drinks, and the household pieties which ever seemed to ask a blessing. I spoke of the pleasant family, so numerous, so varied; the grandmother, made prisoner to an easy-chair, yet never fretful, never morose; who, on the lip of ninety, wore the smile of twenty-five; who could look up from her Bible—with which she was familiar as with the way to her bedroom—to listen to the news of the moment, and to feel interested in it; who, with the light of the golden city in her eyes, could listen and enter into a girl's trouble about her white frock and her first dance. There is nothing keeps so well as a good heart; nothing which time sweetens so to the core. I spoke of Kingsburgh himself, guileless, chivalrous, hospitable; of his sisters, one a widow, one a spinster; of his brave soldier nephew from India; of his pretty nieces, with their English voices and their English wild-rose bloom—who loved the heather and the mist, and the blue Loch with the gulls sweeping over it, but him most of all; of his sons, deep in the Gorilla Book, and to whose stories, and the history of whose adventures and exploits grandmamma's ears were ever open. I spoke too of the guests that came and went during my stay—the soldier, the artist, the mysterious man, who, so far as any of us knew, had neither name, occupation, nor country, who was without parents and antecedents—who was himself alone; of the games of croquet on the sunny lawn, of the pic-nics and excursions, of the books read in the cool twilight of the moss-house, of the smoking parliament held in the stables on rainy days, of the quiet cigar in the open air before going to bed. 'Twas the pleasantest fortnight I ever remember to have spent; and before I had finished telling my companion all about it we had taken our seats in the dog-cart, and were pretty well advanced on the way to Uig.
On the way to Uig.
Uig is distant from Kingsburgh about five miles; the road is high above the sea, and as you drive along you behold the northern headlands of Skye, the wide blue Minch, and Harris, rising like a cloud on the horizon; and if the day is fine, you will enjoy the commerce of sea and sky, the innumerable tints thrown by the clouds on the watery mirror, the mat of glittering light spread beneath the sun, the gray lines of showers on the distant promontories, the tracks of air currents on the mobile element between. The clouds pass from shape to shape—what resembles a dragon one moment resembles something else the next; the promontory which was obscure ten minutes ago is now yellow-green in sunlight; the watery pavement is tesselated with hues, but with hues that continually shift and change. In the vast outlook there is utter silence, but no rest. What with swimming vapour, passing Proteus-like from form to form—obscure showers that run—vagrant impulses of wind—sunbeams that gild and die in gilding—the vast impressionable mimetic floor outspread,—the sight you behold when you toil up the steep road from Kingsburgh to Uig is full of motion. There is no rest in nature, they say; and the clouds are changing like opinions and kingdoms, and the bodies and souls of men. Matter is a stream that flows, a fire that burns. By a cunninger chemistry than ours, the atoms that composed the body of Adam could be arrested somewhere yet.
The inn at Uig.
Just when you have reached the highest part of the road you come in view of the Bay of Uig. You are high above it as you drive or walk along, the ground is equally high on the other side, and about the distance of a mile inland, on a great sandy beach, the tide is rolling in long white lines that chase each other. On the deep water outside the tidal lines a yacht is rocking; there is a mansion-house with a flag-staff on the shore, and at the top of the bay are several houses, a church, and a school-house, built of comfortable stone and lime. When the Minch is angry outside, washing the headlands with spray, Uig is the refuge which the fisherman and the coaster seek. When once they have entered its rocky portals they are safe. The road now descends towards the shore; there is an inn midway, low-roofed, dimly-lighted, covered with thatch—on the whole perhaps the most unpromising edifice in the neighbourhood. Here we pulled up. Already we had driven some twenty-five miles, and as we wished to push on to Duntulm that evening, we were anxious to procure a fresh horse. The keen air had whetted our appetites, and we were eager for dinner, or what substitute for dinner could be provided. Our driver unharnessed the horse, and we entered a little room, spotlessly clean, however, and knocked with our knuckles on the deal table. When the red-haired handmaiden entered, we discovered that the Uig bill of fare consisted of bread and butter, cheese, whisky, milk, and hard-boiled eggs—and a very satisfactory bill of fare we considered it too. There is no such condiment as hunger honourably earned by exercise in the open air. When the viands were placed before us we attacked them manfully. The bread and butter disappeared, the hard-boiled eggs disappeared, we flinched not before the slices of goats'-milk cheese; then we made equal division of the whisky, poured it into bowls of milk, and drank with relish. While in the middle of the feast the landlord entered—he wore the kilt, the only person almost whom I had seen wearing it in my sojourn in the island—to make arrangements relative to the fresh horse. He admitted that he possessed an animal, but as he possessed a gig and eke a driver, it was his opinion that the three should go together. To this we objected, stating that as we already had a vehicle and a driver, and as they were in no wise tired, such a change as he suggested would be needless. We told him also that we meant to remain at Duntulm for one night only, and that by noon of the following day we would be back at his hostelry with his horse. The landlord seemed somewhat moved by our representations, and just when victory was hanging in the balance the brilliant idea struck my companion that he should be bribed with his own whisky. At the rap on the deal table the red-haired wench appeared, the order was given, and in a trice a jorum of mountain dew was produced. This decided matters, the landlord laid down the arms of argument, and after we had solemnly drunk each other's health he went out for the fresh horse, and in a quarter of an hour we were all right, and slowly descending the steep hill-road to Uig.
The road to Duntulm.
We drove through the village, where a good deal of building seemed going on, and then began to climb the hill-road that rose beyond it. Along the hill-side this road zig-zagged in such a curious manner, ran in such terraces and parallel lines, that the dog-cart immediately beneath you, and into which you could almost chuck a biscuit—the one machine heading east the other west—would take ten minutes before it reached the point to which you had obtained. At last we reached the top of the wavy ascent, passed through a mile or two of moory wilderness, in which we met a long string of women bringing home creels of peats, and then in the early sunset descended the long hill-side which led to Kilmuir. Driving along we had Mugstot pointed out to us—a plain white dwelling on our left in which Macdonald lived after he had vacated Duntulm, and while Armadale was yet building. About this place, too, the Parliamentary Road stopped. No longer could we drive along smoothly as on an English turnpike. The pathway now was narrow and stony, and the dog-cart bumped and jolted in a most distressing manner. During the last hour, too, the scenery had changed its character. We were no longer descending a hill-side on which the afternoon sun shone pleasantly. Our path still lay along the sea, but above us were high cliffs with great boulders lying at their feet; beneath us, and sloping down to the sea level, boulders lay piled on each other, and against these the making tide seethed and fretted. The sun was setting on the Minch, and the irregular purple outline of Harris was distinctly visible on the horizon. For some time back we had seen no house, nor had our path been crossed by a single human being. The solitariness and desolation of the scenery affected one. Everything around was unfamiliar and portentous. The road on which we drove was like a road in the "Faery Queen," along which a knight, the sunset dancing on his armour, might prick in search of perilous adventure. The chin of the sun now rested on the Minch, the overhanging cliffs were rosy, and the rocky road began to seem interminable. At last there was a sudden turn, and there, on a little promontory, with shattered wall and loophole against the red light, stood Duntulm—the castle of all others that I most wished to see.
A hospitable reception.
Going down the rocky road, the uncomfortable idea crept into our minds that Duntulm, to whom we bore a letter of introduction from the Landlord, might—like the owner of Kingsburgh—have gone to the south on business. We could hardly have returned to Uig that night, and this thought made yet more rigid the wall of rosy cliff above us, and yet more dreary the seethe of the Minch amongst the broken boulders beneath. As suspense was worse than certainty, we urged on the Uig horse, and in a short time, with the broken castle behind us, drew up at the house. Duntulm had seen us coming, and when we alighted he was at the door, his face hospitable as a fire in winter time, and his outstretched hand the best evidence of good wishes. In a moment the bald red cliffs and the homeless seething of the Minch among the broken stones faded out of my memory. We mentioned our names, and proffered the letter of introduction. "There is no need," said he, as he thrust the epistle into his pocket, "civility before ceremony. Having come you are of course my guests. Come in. The letter will tell me who you are soon enough." And so we were carried into the little parlour till our bedrooms were got ready, and then we went up-stairs, washed our hands and faces, changed our clothes, and came down for tea. When we entered the parlour, the tea-urn was hissing on the table, and with our host sat a photographer—bearded as all artists at the present day are—who had been engaged during the afternoon on Flora Macdonald's grave.
When tea was over we were carried into another room where were materials placed for the brewing of punch. Through the window I beheld spectral castle, the sea on which the light was dying, the purple fringe of Harris on the horizon. And seated there, in the remotest corner of Skye, amongst people whom I had never before seen, girt by walls of cliffs and the sounding sea, in a region, too, in which there was no proper night, I confess to have been conscious of a pleasant feeling of strangeness, of removal from all customary conditions of thought and locality, which I like at times to recall and enjoy over again. Into this feeling the strange country through which I had that day driven, the strange room in which I sat, the strange faces surrounding me, the strange talk, all entered; yet I am almost certain that it was heightened to no inconsiderable extent by the peculiar spirit bottle on the table. This bottle was pale green in colour, was composed of two hollow hemispheres like a sand-glass, the mouthpiece surmounting the upper hemisphere of course; and from the upper hemisphere to the lower sprang four hollow arms, through which the liquor coursed, giving the bottle a curiously square appearance. I had never seen such a bottle before, and I suppose till I go back to Duntulm I am not likely to see its like. Its shape was peculiar, and that peculiarity dove-tailed into the peculiarity of everything else. We sat there till the light had died out on the sea, and the cloud had come down on Harris, and then the candles were brought in.
Donald Gorm.
But the broken tower of Duntulm still abode in my memory, and I began to make inquiries concerning it. I was told that it was long the seat of the Macdonalds, but that after the family had been driven out of it by the ghost of Donald Gorm, they removed to Mugstot. "Donald Gorm!" I said; "were they driven out by the restless spirit of the Donald who flouted Macleod at his own table at Dunvegan—who, when he was asked to show his dirk, held it up in the torch-light in the face of Macleod and of his gentlemen, with the exclamation, 'Here it is, Macleod of Dunvegan, and in the best hand for pushing it home in the four and twenty islands of the Hebrides?'" "They were driven away by the spirit of the same Donald," said our host. "That chieftain had been stricken by a lingering yet mortal illness, and removed to Edinburgh, and placed himself under the care of the leeches there. His body lay on a sick-bed in Edinburgh, but his spirit roamed about the passages and galleries of the castle. The people heard the noises, and the slamming of doors, and the waving of tartans on the staircases, and did not know that it was the spirit of their sick master that troubled them. It was found out, however. The servants were frightened out of their wits by the unearthly voices, and the sounds of weeping, the waving of shadowy tartans, and the wringing of shadowy hands, and declared that they would no longer abide in the castle. At last a young man, from Kilmuir over there, said that if they would provide him with a sword and a Bible, and plenty to eat and drink, he would sit up in the hall all night and speak to the apparition. His offer was accepted, and he sat down to supper in the great hall with his sword drawn and his Bible open on the table before him. At midnight he heard doors open and close, and the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and before he knew where he was there was Donald Gorm, dressed in tartan as if for feast or battle, standing on the floor and looking at him. 'What do you want with me, Donald?' said the young man. 'I was in Edinburgh last night,' said the spirit, 'and I am in my own castle to-night. Don't be afraid, man; there is more force in the little pebble which you chuck away from you with your finger and thumb than there is in my entire body of strength. Tell Donald Gorm Og—("Donald's son, you know," interpolated the photographer)—tell Donald Gorm Og to stand up for the right against might, to be generous to the multitude, to have a charitable hand stretched out to the poor. Woe's me! woe's me! I have spoken to a mortal, and must leave the castle to-night,' and so the ghost of Donald vanished, and the young man was left sitting in the hall alone. Donald died in Edinburgh and was buried there; but after his death, as during his life, his spirit walked about here until the family was compelled to leave. It was a fine place once, but it has been crumbling away year by year, and is now broken and hollow like a witch's tooth. The story I have told you is devoutly believed by all the fishermen, herdsmen, and milkmaids in the neighbourhood. I think Mr Maciver, the clergyman at Kilmuir, is the only person in the neighbourhood who has no faith in it." This ghost story the photographer capped by another, and when that was finished we went to bed.
Flora Macdonald's grave.
Next morning we went out to inspect the old castle, and found it a mere shell. Compared with its appearance the night before, when it stood in relief against the red sky, it was strangely unimpressive; a fragment of a tower and a portion of flanking wall stood erect; there were traces of building down on the slope near the sea, but all the rest was a mere rubble of fallen masonry. It had been despoiled in every way; the elements had worn and battered it, the people of the district had for years back made it a quarry, and built out of it dwellings, out-houses, and dikes—making the past serve the purposes of the present. Sheep destined for the London market were cropping the herbage around its base—suggesting curious comparisons, and bringing into keener contrast antiquity and to-day. While we were loitering about the ruins the photographer came up, and under his guidance we went to visit Kilmuir churchyard, in which Flora Macdonald rests. We went along the stony road down which we had driven the night previously—the cliffs lately so rosy, gray enough now, and the seethe of the fresh sea amongst the boulders and shingle beneath rather exhilarating than otherwise. After a walk of about a couple of miles we left the road, climbed up a grassy ascent, and found the churchyard there, enclosed by a low stone wall. Everything was in hideous disrepair. The gate was open, the tomb-stones were broken and defaced, and above the grave of the heroine nettles were growing more luxuriously than any crop I had yet had the good fortune to behold in the island. Skye has only one historical grave to dress—and she leaves it so. On expressing our surprise to the photographer, he told us that a London sculptor passing that way, and whose heart burned within him at the sight, had offered at several dinner-tables in the district to execute a bronze medallion of the famous lady, gratis, provided his guests would undertake to have it properly placed, and to a have fitting inscription carved upon the pedestal. "The proposal was made, I know," said the photographer, "for the sculptor told me about it himself. His proposal has not been taken up, nor is it likely to be taken up now. The country which treats the grave of a heroine after that fashion is not worthy to have a heroine. Still,"—he went eyeing the place critically, with his head a little to one side—"it makes a picturesque photograph as it stands—perhaps better than if it were neat and tidy." We plucked a nettle from the grave and then returned to Duntulm to breakfast.
Quirang.
Shortly after breakfast our dog-cart was at the door, and followed by Duntulm and the photographer in a similar machine, we were on our way to Quirang. A drive of a couple of hours brought us to the base of the singular mountain. Tilting our vehicles, leaving the horses to roam about picking the short grass, and carrying with us materials for luncheon on the crest, we began the ascent. The day was fine, the sky cloudless, and in an hour we were toiling past the rocky spire of the needle, and in fifteen minutes thereafter, we reached the flat green plateau on the top. Here we lunched and sang songs, and made mock heroic speeches in proposing each other's health. I had ascended the Quirang before in rain, and wind, and vapour, and could hardly recognise it now under the different atmospherical conditions. Then every stone was slippery, every runnel a torrent, the top of the needle lost in the flying mist, everything looking spectral, weird, and abnormal. On the present occasion, we saw it in fair sunlight; and what the basalt columns, the shattered precipices, the projecting spiry rocks lost in terror they gained in beauty. Reclining on the soft green grass—strange to find grass so girdled by fantastic crags—we had, through fissures and the rents of ancient earthquake, the loveliest peeps of the map-like under world swathed in faint sea azure. An hour, perhaps, we lay there; and then began the long descent. When we reached the dog-carts we exchanged a parting cup, and then Duntulm and the photographer returned home, and we hied on to Uig.
Arriving at Uig we dined—the bill of fare identical with that on the preceding day; the hard-boiled eggs, only a shade harder boiled perhaps; and then having settled with the kilted landlord—the charge wondrously moderate—we got out our own horse, and with the setting sun making splendid the Minch behind us, we started for Portree. It was eleven P.M. before we reached the little town, the moon was shining clearly, a stray candle or two twinkling in the houses, and when we reached the hotel door the building was lighted up—it had been a fair day, the prices for cattle were good, and over whisky punch farmer and drover were fraternising.
Next morning, in the soft sky was the wild outline of the Cuchullins, with which we were again to make acquaintance. Somehow these hills never weary, you never become familiar with them, intimacy can no more stale them than it could the beauty of Cleopatra. From the hotel door I regarded them with as much interest as when, from the deck of the steamer off Ardnamurchan ten years ago, I first beheld them with their clouds on the horizon. While at breakfast in the public room, farmer and drover dropped in—the more fiery-throated drinking pale ale instead of tea. After breakfast we were again in the dog-cart driving leisurely toward Sligachan—the wonderful mountains beyond gradually losing tenderness of morning hue and growing worn and hoary, standing with sharper edges against the light, becoming rough with rocky knob and buttress, and grayly wrinkled with ravines. When we reached the inn we found it full of company, bells continually jangling, half a dozen machines at the door, and a party of gentlemen in knickerbockers starting with rods and fishing-baskets. Here we returned the dog-cart to the landlord, and began to address ourselves to the desolate glen stretching between the inn and Camasunary.
Glen Sligachan.
In Glen Sligachan, although you lose sight of the Cuchullins proper, you are surrounded by their outlying and far-radiating spurs. The glen is some eight miles in length, and is wild and desolate beyond conception. Walking along, too, the reticulations of the hills are picked out with that pale greenish tint, which I had noted as characteristic of the hills seen from Lord Macdonald's deer forest, and which gives one the idea of the overflow of chemical fluids, of metallic corrosions and discolorations. There is no proper path, and you walk in the loose debris of torrents; and in Glen Sligachan, as in many other parts of Skye, the scenery curiously repels you, and drives you in on yourself. You have a quickened sense of your own individuality. The enormous bulks, their gradual recedings to invisible crests, their utter movelessness, their austere silence, daunt you. You are conscious of their presence, and you hardly care to speak lest you be overheard. You can't laugh. You would not crack a joke for the world. Glen Sligachan would be the place to do a little bit of self-examination in. There you would have a sense of your own meannesses, selfishnesses, paltry evasions of truth and duty, and find out what a shabby fellow you at heart are—and looking up to your silent father-confessors, you would find no mercy in their grim faces. I do not know what effect mountains have on the people who live habitually amongst them, but the stranger they make serious and grave at heart. Through this glen we trudged silently enough, and when two-thirds of the distance had been accomplished, it was with a feeling of relief that a lake was descried ahead. The sight of anything mobile, of an element that could glitter and dimple and dance, took away from the sense of the stony eternities, gray and wrinkled as with the traces of long-forgotten passion, listening for ever, dumb for ever. After rounding the lake, which plashed merrily on its margin, and clambering over a long waste of boulder, we saw as we ascended a low flank of Blaavin, the Bay of Camasunary, the house, and the very boat which M'Ian had borrowed on the day we went to visit Loch Coruisk, below us. The tobacco-less man was nowhere visible, and I marvelled whether his messenger had yet returned from Broadford.
Kilmaree.
When we got to the top of the hill we had to descend the slope to Kilmaree; and as on my return from Loch Coruisk I had come down pleasantly under the guidance of M'Ian, I fancied, naturally enough, that I could act as guide on the present occasion. But there is a knack in descending hills as there is in everything else. First of all, I lost the narrow footpath at the top; then as we were bound to reach Loch Eishart, and as Loch Eishart lay below us distinctly visible, I led directly for it; but somehow we were getting continually on the wrong bank of a pestilent stream, which, through chasm and ravine, found its way to the sea by apparently the most circuitous of courses. This stream we forded a dozen times at the least, and sometimes in imminent danger of a ducking. It was now late in the afternoon, and the weather had changed. The tops of the hills began to be lost in mist, and long lines of sea fog to creep along the lower grounds. There was at intervals a slow drizzle of rain. Fetching a cunning circuit, as I supposed, we found the inevitable stream again in our front, and got across it with difficulty—happily for the last time. After we had proceeded about a hundred yards we came upon the lost pathway, and in fifteen minutes thereafter we were standing upon the shore of the Loch watching the flying scud of Atlantic mist, and the green waves rolling underneath with their white caps on.
The wood-choppers.
The question now arose—By what means could we reach Mr M'Ian? There was no ferry at Kilmaree, but sundry boats were drawn up on the shore, and a couple were bobbing on the restless water at the stony pier. There were the boats certainly enough, but where were the boatmen? In the neighbourhood men could surely be obtained who, for a consideration, would take us across. We directed our steps to the lodge at Kilmaree, which seemed untenanted, and after some little trouble penetrated into the region of the offices and outhouses. Here we found a couple of men chopping sticks, and to them my companion—who as a man of business and learned in the law was the spokesman on such occasions—addressed himself. "You want to go over to Mr M'Ian's to-night?" said the elder, desisting from his task, and standing up with his axe in his hand. "Yes, we are particularly anxious to get across. Can you take us?" "I don't know; you see we are no ferrymen, an' if we take you across we must leave our work." "Of course you must; but we'll pay you for your trouble." Here the two men exchanged a sentence or two of Gaelic, and then the elder wood-chopper asked, "Do you know Mr M'Ian?" "Oh, yes, we know him very well." "Does he expect you this night?" "No; but we are anxious to see him, and he will be glad to see us." "I'm no sure we can take you across," said the man hesitatingly; "you see the master is from home, an' the wind is rising, an' we're no ferrymen, an' we'll need to borrow a boat, an'"—here he hesitated still more—"it would cost you something." "Of course it will. What will you expect." "Wad you think ten shillings too much?" "No, we'll give you ten shillings," said Fellowes, clinching the bargain. "And," said I, coming in like a swift charge of lancers on a half-disorganised battalion, and making victory complete, "we'll give you a glass of spirits at the house, too, when you get across." The men then threw down their axes, put on their jackets, which hung on nails on the walls, and talking busily in Gaelic, led the way to the little stony pier where the boats were moored.