Part 21 (1/2)
In this chapter (as, indeed, in all the others) I am rummaging among my souvenirs for materials that are in some way noteworthy. It is utterly impossible to exhaust the romance and glamour of the Highlands. Those who go regularly North are certain to bring back, on each occasion, a host of interesting memories. ”Swift as a weaver's shuttle fly our years”: the chief difficulty is to jot down all that one sees and hears.
On the occasion of my second visit to Appin, I stayed in the fine new hotel built on the eminence called Druim-an-t-Sealbhain. The landlord is a man of great wit and reading, and with him I had some enjoyable hours of miscellaneous conversation. Mr. Macdonald (for that is his name) has an excellent knowledge of the Celtic dialects, has translated into Gaelic verse some of the best-known poems of Burns, Tannahill, and Byron, and is extremely clever at retailing the legendary tales that still go rumouring along the Strath of Appin. He has also a good knowledge of English literature, and told me certain details regarding Scott and Wordsworth which I was pleased to know.
It seems that Sir Walter was at one time tutor in Appin House, and was in the habit of visiting the cot of an old shepherd, a notorious _seanachie_, full of romantic lore, for the purpose of hearing, and writing down, the old man's tales. An oak tree is still pointed out, under which, it is said, Scott composed part of _The Lord of the Isles_.
Appin is not very far from the castles of Dunollie and Dunstaffnage, which Sir Walter wrought skilfully into the texture of his tales.
The most interesting item mentioned by Mr. Macdonald had reference to the visit of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, in the year 1803. Everyone who has read the life of the great poet of Nature knows the charming description of the district contained in one of his sister's letters. ”We arrived,” she says, ”at Port-na-croish. It is a small village--a few huts and an indifferent inn, by the side of the loch; ordered a fowl for dinner, had a fire lighted, and went a few steps from the door up the road, and turning aside into a field, stood at the top of a low eminence, from which, looking down the loch to the sea through a long vista of hills and mountains, _we beheld one of the most delightful prospects that, even when we dream of fairer worlds than this, it is possible to conceive in our hearts_.” Here follows a description so exquisite of the sea-scenery and the Morven Hills, that it deserves to be cla.s.sed with the finest examples of word-painting in the English language.
The new hotel at Appin is built on the low eminence referred to in the above-cited letter. The name Druim-an-t-Sealbhain is giving way to the complimentary t.i.tle of ”Dorothy Wordsworth's View.” From the front windows of the hotel, the same calm inland seas, gra.s.sy hills, Morven mists, grim old forts, and intricate communion of land and water, can be seen precisely as they were seen by the Wordsworths more than a century ago. The Port-na-croish inn has become a village store: it is well worthy of note, not merely for the reference in the letter, but for a fine legend, which I shall now narrate.
MACDONALD'S GRAt.i.tUDE.
The first tenant of the inn was a Macdonald of Glencoe, a man between sixty and seventy at the time of the story, the year 1755 namely. He had around him a family of stalwart sons, all imbued with intense hatred of the clan Campbell. The peculiar and fiendish malignity of the terrible ma.s.sacre of Glencoe precluded all possibility of forgiveness on the part of the clan. Highland hospitality has always been a lavish and magnificent thing, and Colonel Campbell and his a.s.sa.s.sins had been treated with exceptional kindness in Glencoe. The b.l.o.o.d.y outrage, in a midnight of winter snows, was too terrible a meed of hospitality to be readily forgotten or forgiven by the Macdonalds. This old innkeeper of Port-na-croish, then, hated the Campbells with the unquenchable hate that deep wrongs, done not alone to an individual but to a tribe, engender in the Celtic soul.
One day a white-bearded wayfarer begged food and shelter in the little hostel, and in the course of conversation over the meal that was soon spread on the board for his wants, he let slip an avowal that, in his youth, as one of Campbell's men, he had taken part in the gruesome ma.s.sacre of the ”valley of weeping.” Without more ado, the landlord slipped out and posted his sons at the door, with whispered orders to them that the stranger should be dirked to death on crossing the threshold of the inn. Returning indoors, old Macdonald, dissimulating his fell intentions, proceeded to ply the visitor with question upon question, so as to gain a detailed knowledge of all the incidents of the weird carnage. Finally he said, ”Tell me, Campbell, what part of that devilish business made the strongest impression on your mind?” ”I will tell you,” said the old soldier, ”what to me was the outstanding incident of that night. Towards the close of the ma.s.sacre, a child's voice was heard piercingly on the night air--a scream it was, and seemed to come from no great distance. The captain sent me in the direction of the sound, bidding me, if the child should be a male Macdonald, to kill it forthwith; if a girl, to spare. I soon came up to the place whence the sound proceeded, and saw through the whirling snow, under the protection of a jutting cliff, a nurse with a boy of four years old, both of them wailing and s.h.i.+vering with cold. The child was gnawing a bone and, near by, a dog was crouching. Pity wrung my heart. I drove my bayonet through the trembling cur, and, going back to the captain, showed him the b.l.o.o.d.y steel as a proof that I had obeyed his commands.”
The innkeeper, who had been all ears, said: ”You, then, were that soldier?” ”I was, indeed,” replied the old wanderer. ”_And I was that child!_” said the landlord, ”and _your_ life is saved. My sons stand at the threshold of the inn, ready to fall upon you when you leave. I countermand the order for your destruction. Here you shall stay, an honoured guest, till the end of your days, as a recompense for saving my life on that awful night.”
The story goes on to state that the foot-weary Campbell lived for some years a pensioner in Port-na-croish inn, and was buried at the expense of the grateful innkeeper. I do not know any story that comes nearer perfection.
NOTES ON THE TROSSACHS.
The Rev. Mr. Wilson, the cultured and genial minister of the Trossachs, has recently published a most readable little book on the district he knows so well. Perhaps no district indeed on the world's surface is so well known (even to those who have never seen it), as the Trossachs.
Little did Sir Walter suspect, when he penned the stirring iambics of _The Lady of the Lake_, that he was furnis.h.i.+ng materials to the pedagogue which would be pa.r.s.ed, a.n.a.lysed, and dissected by myriads of pupils in all the schools of the British Empire. We shall all carry with us to the grave the leading pa.s.sages of that romantic lay: the stag-hunt, the duel at Coilantogle Ford, the whistle that garrisoned the glen, and the episode of the Fiery Cross. Such lines, we may say, have gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
Happening to pa.s.s Strathyre station in July, 1907, I was requested by a bright-eyed little j.a.panese gentleman in the compartment to tell him where we were. On being informed, he (after casting an eye of pity on the deplorable stork that is supposed to decorate the drinking-fountain of the station), began to declaim, in capital English, the pa.s.sage that begins--
”Benledi saw the Cross of Fire, It glanced like lightning up Strathyre, O'er dale and hill the summons flew, Nor rest nor pause young Angus knew; The tear that gathered in his eye He left the mountain breeze to dry.”
Mr. Wilson's book to which I have alluded is a collection of the impressions written down by eminent visitors to the locality, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Queen Victoria. Carlyle, who was in Perths.h.i.+re in 1818, wrote the following note, which, though short, is finely characteristic of him: ”The Trossachs I found really grand and impressive, Loch Katrine exquisitely so, my first taste of the beautiful in scenery. Not so, any of us, the dirty, smoky farm-hut at the entrance, with no provision in it but bad oatcakes and unacceptable whisky, or the Mrs. Stewart who somewhat royally presided over it, and dispensed these dainties, expecting to be flattered like an independency, as well as paid like an innkeeper.” The foregoing note, by itself, is good value for the cost of Mr. Wilson's book (two s.h.i.+llings, namely), and raises regrets that the author of _Sartor_ did not travel oftener through the Land of Cakes. (The only other place in the Highlands where I have heard Carlyle spoken of, is Kyleakin in Skye, where he was the guest of Lady Ashburton, and where (as the natives say), the c.o.c.ks and hens had to be removed out of ear-shot for his convenience.)
One of Mr. Wilson's stories (contributed by a lady) is apposite at the present time, when so much is being heard of women's rights. Glengyle, a district of the Trossachs, was once _entirely ruled_ by a number of women, who const.i.tuted a sort of High Court with women as Judge and Jury. ”The most notorious case which they dealt with, and which probably led to their downfall through drawing the ridicule of the country upon them, was a case of horse-stealing. The accused man had been seen riding furiously away on someone else's horse, and all evidence pointed to his guilt. To the astonishment of the outsiders, the jury returned a verdict of 'not guilty,' and the Judge on summing up declared the horse was the culprit, as it had run away with the man. _She condemned the unfortunate animal to be hanged, and hanged it was, while the man got off scot free._”
LOCHFYNE-SIDE.
None of the mainland counties of Scotland can boast of such wonderful ramifications of sea and loch as the county of Argyll. The present amiable and cultured head of the Clan Campbell declaimed, with great applause, at a social gathering not long ago, a fine poem, in which the beauties of his ancestral s.h.i.+re were floridly--but not unjustly--elaborated. It would be difficult to over-praise the county of Argyll, with its splendid sea-board, its rugged and impressive peaks, and its unrivalled fiords and lakes. Thanks to its proximity to large centres of population, few counties are so much visited. Its fame, in our day, is likely to be more widespread than ever, owing to the graceful and entertaining writings of Mr. Neil Munro, who probably knows the details of its local history better than any man living, and who possesses the inimitable art of interesting others in his delineations of the past. I confess that I feel, personally, as much interest in the Wars of Lorn as I do in the Siege of Sphacteria, and that ”Glee'd Argyll” seems fully as attractive as Cleon or Brasidas.
Of course, long before Mr. Munro, Loch Fyne had a European reputation, which it owed to its herring. The Popes of Rome used to eat these herring in mediaeval times, and sent for them _via_ Amsterdam or Antwerp.
Orthodox Catholics have always had good judgment in the matter of fish, and especially the French, who belong to a country which proudly boasts of being _the eldest daughter of the Church_. For many a generation the French came annually to Lochgilphead, and bartered their kegs of claret for barrels of salt herring. The French Revolution, among its many other effects, put a stop to this trade. War lasted for so many years between Britain and France, that, at the end of it all, the continental sailors had forgotten the way to Loch Fyne.
Argylls.h.i.+re is rich in legends, for many of which no date can be given except the elastic one _long ago_ or _in byegone times_. Let me cite one or two of these:--
MACIVORS, MACVICARS, AND MACALLISTERS.
On the road to Kilmartin is a place called the Robber's Den, the locality of which may be firmly fixed in the tourist's memory by noting that it is just behind a large distillery. Here, long ago, lived one Macvicar, whose wife was a Macivor. These names are important, and so also is that of the Macallisters of Tarbert, who one day stole cattle belonging to the Macivors. Mrs. Macvicar noticed these Tarbert scoundrels driving her father's cattle through the glen, and mentioned the fact to her boy. Young Macvicar followed the robbers, and found them in a forest feeding joyously on a slain bullock belonging to his grandfather. As each Macallister finished picking a bone, he would throw it violently against a big stone, remarking at the same time, with a chuckle: ”_If a Macivor were here, that's how I would treat him_.” The boy, from his hiding-place in the foliage, threw a stone and struck one of the feasters. The injured man blamed one of his own clansmen, and, after much recrimination, a free fight of Macallisters was the result.
During the melee, the boy slunk off and told his mother's family what was happening. The Macivors, in a furious and determined band, soon fell upon their disordered foes, and completely routed them and regained their cattle, _minus_ the consumed bullock. The chief of the Macallisters was slain by a woman, who took off her stocking, placed a _large stone therein_, and heaved it at his head. That same night, Mrs.