rocky stream below, had no redeeming whitewash, no vines about their
doors. The turf around them was worn away. Some were chimneyless; on
others the thatch, where the weeds did not hold it together, had broken
through, leaving great holes in the roof. On a bench, tilted up against
the wall of the lowest of these cottages, sat an old gray-haired man in
Tam o' Shanter, his head bent low, his clasped hands falling between his
knees. It was a picturesque place, and we camped out a while under an
old cart near the road-side. Perhaps it would have been wise if, like
Mr. Hamerton, we could have seen only the picturesqueness of the
Highland clachan, only the color and sublimity of the huts, only the
fine women who live within them. But how could we sit there and not see
that the picturesqueness was that of misery, that whatever color and
sublimity there might be--and to the sublimity, I must confess, we were
blind--were but outward signs of poverty and squalor, and that the huts
sheltered not only strong young women, but feeble old men like that
pathetic figure with the clasped hands and bent head? We have seen the
old age of the poor, when we thought it but a peaceful rest after the
work of years. In English almshouses we have found it in our hearts to
envy the old men and women their homes; but here despair and sadness
seemed the portion of old age. I do not know why it was, but as we
watched that gray-haired man, though there was a space of blue sky just
above him, and the day was warm and the air sweet, it was of the winter
he made us think; of the time soon to come when the cold winds would
roar through the pass, and snow would lie on the hills, and he would
shiver alone in the chimneyless cottage with its one tiny window. A few
miles away, men in a fortnight throw away on their fishing more than
these people can make in years. Scotch landlords rent their wild,
uncultivated acres for fabulous sums, while villages like this grow
desolate. If, when you are in the Highlands, you would still see them as
they are in the stupid romance of Scott or in the sickly sentiment of
Landseer, or as a mere pleasure-ground for tourists and sportsmen, you
must get the people out of your mind, just as the laird gets them off
his estate. Go everywhere, by stage and steamboat, and when you come to
a clachan or to a lonely cottage, shut your eyes and pass on; else you
must realize, as we did--and more strongly as we went farther--that this
land, which holiday-makers have come to look upon as their own, is the
saddest on God's earth.
Before we left the shade of the cart a little girl went by, and we asked
her the name of the village.
"Kilchrennan," she said, with impossible gutturals, and then she spelled
it for us.
It was a good sign, we thought; if Highland children to-day are taught
to spell, Highland men and women to-morrow may learn to think, and when
they learn to think, then, let the landlord remember, they will begin to
act.
After Kilchrennan, the road crossed the moorland, Ben-Cruachan towering
far to our right. At the foot of the one wooded hill-side in all this
heather-clad moor we met with the only adventure of the morning; for it
was here we espied in the road, in front of us, a black bull. It fixed
its horrid eyes upon us; its horns seemed to stretch from one side of
the way to the other. We cast in our minds whether to go forward or
through the wood, but we thought it best to get the trees between us,
and we fled up the mountain and never stopped until we had left it a
goodly space behind; for indeed it was the dreadfullest bull that ever
we saw.
We came to another wretched village down by Loch Etive. Here again in
the sunshine was an old man. He was walking slowly and feebly up and
down, and there was in his face a look as if hope had long gone from
him. In England, scarce a town or village is without its charities; but
in the Highlands, while deer and grouse are protected by law, men are
chased from their homes,[E] the aged and infirm are left to shift for
themselves. I think the misery of these villages is made to seem but the
greater because of the large house which so often stands close by. We
looked from the weary, silent old man and the row of tiny bare cottages,
to a gay young girl and a young man in a kilt, who together strolled
lazily towards the large house just showing through the trees.
[E] I have left this sentence as it is, though Mr. William
Black was good enough to attack us for making such a statement. If he
has any knowledge whatever on the subject, he must know that it was not
until after the trial in Edinburgh--a trial held a little less than a
year ago, when these pages had been already set up in type for the
MAGAZINE--that it was discovered that deer are not protected by law in
the Highlands. Men, as I have shown further on, cannot now be chased
without reason from their homes, fixity of tenure being the chief good
accomplished by the Crofter's Act of 1886.
[Illustration: KILCHRENNAN.]
When Mr. Hamerton wrote his "Painters' Camp in the Highlands" he
suggested a new route from Oban to Ballachulish by steamer up Loch
Etive, and then by coach through Glen Etive and Glencoe. This is now one
of the regular excursions from Oban, and one of the finest, I think, in
the Highlands. In the glens we met no fewer than five coaches, so that I
suppose the excursion is fairly popular. I wonder that Mr. Hamerton had
a thought for the amusement of tourists, who are to him odious, as it
seems necessary they should be to all right-minded writers of travel.
Now, he might find loch and glens less fine. For the rest of that day,
being tourists ourselves, we bore with all others patiently.
With Taynuilt we left behind even the sparse cultivation of the
Highlands. From the boat we saw that the mountain-slopes were unbroken
by road or path; there was scarce a house in sight. Through Glen Etive
the road was very rough, the mountains were barren, and not a sheep or
cow was on the lower grassy hill-sides. It was all a deer forest, the
guard told us, and even the English tourists in the coach exclaimed
against the waste of good ground. It is well to go first through Glen
Etive. Bare as it seemed to us, it was green when compared to
GLENCOE,
where rocks lay on the road and in the stream and on the hill-sides. The
mountains rose bare and precipitous from their very base, and trees and
grass found no place to grow.
The guard gave us the story of the massacre, with additions and details
of his own which I have forgotten. At the end of the drive he charged
two shillings--for his trouble, I suppose. People write of the emotions
roused by scenery and associations. I think it is afterwards, by reading
up on the subject, that one becomes first conscious of them. However
that may be, of one thing I am certain: we have rarely been more
flippant than we were on that day. In Glen Etive J---- discovered that
Highland streams, where clear brownish water flows over a bed of yellow,
green, and red stones, look like rivers of Julienne soup. In the high
moor at the head of the Glen we were chiefly concerned with a lunch of
milk and scones for a shilling, and grumblings over Highland extortion.
In Glencoe, guard and driver pointed out the old man of the mountain,
who is here the Lord Chancellor, and Ossian's Cave, on high in the rocky
wall, and stopped to show us the Queen's View. But we were more
interested in two cyclers pushing their machines up the steepest,
stoniest bit of road; in a man in a long black frock-coat and silk hat
with crape band, who carried an alpenstock with an umbrella strapped to
it, and strode solemnly up the pass; in a species of gypsy van near
Glencoe Inn, in which, the guard explained, twelve people and a driver
travelled for pleasure. A girl looking very pale and wrapped in shawls
sat at the inn door. The party had stopped on her account, he said; the
drive had made her ill--and no wonder, we thought.
[Illustration: LOCH LEVEN, FROM BALLACHULISH.]
The stony pass led to a pleasant green valley, from which the road set
out over the Bridge of Glencoe for the shores of Loch Leven and
BALLACHULISH.
Almost at once it brought us to a field overlooking the loch, where,
apparently for our benefit, sports were being held.
The droning of the pipes made quite a cheerful sound, the plaids of the
men a bright picture; and when, two miles beyond, we found the hotel
with its windows turned towards the loch, we made up our minds not to
push on to Oban, but to stay and spend Sunday here.
And so we had a second and longer look at the sports. Young men vaulted
with poles; others, in full costume, danced Highland flings and the
sword dance. Two pipers took turns in piping. One had tied gay green
ribbons to his pipe, and he fairly danced himself as he kept time with
his foot. And while we watched we heard but Gaelic spoken. We were in a
foreign country.
[Illustration: OBAN.]
The position of the hotel was the best thing about it. At dinner an
irate clergyman and his daughter took fresh offence at every course,
until, when it came to the rice-pudding, they could stand it no longer
and left the table. We were less nice, and made a hearty meal; but we
thought so poorly of it that the next day, which was Sunday, we found a
lunch of bread and cheese and beer more to our taste. This we ate at the
inn in Glencoe, in company with the clergyman and his daughter. They
were still sore--why, I could not understand--about the pudding, and the
clergyman was consoling himself with a glass of good whiskey.
The following day we came to
OBAN--
the most odious place in the Highlands, I have heard it called; the most
beautiful place in the world, Mr. William Black thinks. When the west
wind blows and the sun shines, there is nothing like it for color, he
told J----. We had to take his word for it. We found an east wind
blowing and gray mist hanging over town and bay, and we could not see
the hills of Mull. When we walked out in the late afternoon, it seemed
a town of hotels and photograph shops, into which excursion trains were
forever emptying excursionists and never carrying them away again.
Crowds were on the parapetless, unsafe embankment; the bay was covered
with boats. In front of the largest hotels bands were playing, and one
or two of the musicians went about, hat in hand, among the passers-by.
Fancy Hassler at Cape May sending one of his men to beg for pennies! It
was dull, for all the crowd. The show of gayety was as little successful
as the attempt of a shivering cockney to look comfortable in his
brand-new kilt.
Altogether, Oban did not seem in the least lovely until we could no
longer see it. But as the twilight grew grayer and the tide went out,
the great curve of the embankment was marked by a circle of lights on
shore and by long waving lines of gold in the bay. At the pier, a
steamer, just arrived, sent up heavy clouds of smoke, black in the
gathering grayness. The boats one by one hung out their lights. Oban was
at peace, though tourists still walked and bands still played.
It was gray and inexpressibly dreary the next day at noon, when we took
the boat for Tobermory, in Mull. Through a Scotch mist we watched Oban
and its picturesque castle out of sight; through a driving rain we
looked forth on the heights of Morven and of Mull. Sometimes the clouds
lightened, and for a minute the nearer hills came out dark and purple
against a space of whitish shining mist; but for the most part they hung
heavy and black over wastes of water and wastes of land. Sir Walter
Scott says that the Sound of Mull is the most striking scene in the
Hebrides; it would have been fair to add, when storms and mists give one
a chance to see it. Pleasure parties sat up on deck, wrapped in
mackintoshes and huddled under umbrellas. Our time was divided between
getting wet and drying off down-stairs. The excitement of the voyage was
the stopping of the steamer, now in mid-stream in "Macleod of Dare"
fashion, now at rain-soaked piers. Of all the heroes who should be
thought of between these two lands of romance, only the most modern was
suggested to us, probably because within a few weeks we had been
re-reading Mr. Black's novel. But, just as in his pages, so in the Sound
of Mull, little boats came out to meet the steamer. They lay in wait,
tossing up and down on the rough waters and manned with Hamishes and
Donalds. Into one stepped a real Macleod, his collie at his heels; into
another, an elderly lady, who was greeted most respectfully by the
Hamish, as he lifted into his boat trunks marked with the name of
Fleeming Jenkin. This gave us something to talk about; when we had last
seen the name it was in a publisher's announcement, which said that Mr.
Stevenson was shortly to write a biographical notice of the _late_
Fleeming Jenkin.
At the piers, groups of people, no better off for occupation than we,
waited to see the passengers land. We all took unaccountable interest in
this landing. At Salen there was an intense moment when, as the steamer
started, a boy on shore discovered that he had forgotten his bag. At the
next pier, where a party of three got off, as their baggage was carried
after them, we even went the length of counting up to forty bags and
bundles, three dogs, and two maids. We left them standing there,
surrounded by their property, with the rain pouring in torrents and not
a house in sight. This is the way you take your pleasure in the
Hebrides. We were glad to see among the boxes a case of champagne. At
the last moment, one of the men, from the edge of the pier, waved a
brown paper parcel, and told the captain that another like it had been
left aboard. I am afraid he had forgotten something else; thence to
Tobermory the captain did but revile him.
TOBERMORY
is a commonplace town with a semicircle of well-to-do houses on the
shores of a sheltered bay. At one end of the wooded heights that follow
the curve of the town is a big hotel; at the other, Aros House, a
brand-new castle, in among the trees. The harbor is shut in by a long,
narrow island, bare and flat. It seemed a place of endless rain and
mist. But when we thought the weather at its worst, the landlady called
it pleasant, and suggested a two miles' walk to the light-house on the
coast. Children played on the street as if the sun shone. We even saw
fishing parties row out towards the Sound.
We had to stay in Tobermory two interminable days, for it was impossible
at first to find a way out of it. Our idea was to walk along the north
and then the west coast, and so to Ulva; but the landlady was of the
opinion that there was no getting from Tobermory except by boat.
Fishermen in the bar-room thought they had heard of a rough road around
the coast, and knew that on it we should find no inn. The landlord, to
make an end of our questions, declared that we must go to Iona by the
boat due the next morning at eight. This seemed the only chance of
escape unless we were to return to Oban.
In the mean time there was nothing to do, nothing to see. The hotel
windows looked out on the gray, cheerless bay, dotted with yachts. Once
we walked in the rain to the light-house, and back across the moors. The
wind never stopped blowing a gale.
"If anybody wants to know what Mull's like in summer," said J----, in
disgust, "all they've got to do is to go to a New Jersey pine barren
when an equinoctial's on."
At our early breakfast the next morning, the landlord told us that it
was dark outside the bay. It must have been wilder even than he thought.
No boat for Iona came.
It was after this disappointment that J----, by chance, in the
post-office, met the Procurator Fiscal, whatever he may be. We have good
reason to be grateful to him. He mapped out a walking route to Salen,
and thence to Loch-Na-Keal, at the northern end of which is the island
of Ulva--the soft Ool-a-va which always leads the chorus of the islands
in Mr. Black's tragedy, "Macleod of Dare."
We did not care to walk to Salen in the rain; we were not willing to
spend another night in Tobermory. Therefore, that same afternoon, when
the boat from Skye touched at the pier, we got on board. We believed in
the roughness of the sea beyond the Sound when we saw tourists prostrate
in the cabin, with eloquent indifference to looks. But it was short
steaming to
SALEN,
where we faced wind and rain to walk about a quarter of a mile to the
hotel.
Here, as Dr. Johnson said in Glenelg, "of the provisions, the negative
catalogue was very copious." The landlady asked us what we should like
for supper; she might have spared herself the trouble, since she had
nothing to give us but ham and eggs. However, we found the outlook less
depressing than at Tobermory. There was no commonplace little town in
sight, but only bare rolling grounds stretching to a bay, and on the
shores the ruins of a real old castle, of which Mr. Abbey once very
unkindly made a drawing, so that J----, for his own sake, thought it
best to let it alone. There was, moreover, something to read. Lying with
the guide-books were the "Life of Dr. Norman Mcleod," "Castle
Dangerous," and the "Life of the Prince Consort." J---- devoured them
all three, and the next day regaled me with choice extracts concerning
the domestic virtues of the royal family.
When we awoke, the clouds were breaking. Across the Sound of Mull they
were low on the heights of Morven, but the hill-sides were green,
streaked with sunshine. Above were long rifts of blue sky, and in the
bay a little yacht rocked on glittering water. We ate more ham and eggs,
and made ready to begin our tramp at once.
Neither maid nor landlord could tell us if there were inns on the road
to Bunessan. In Mull a man knows but his own immediate neighborhood. In
the hotels, the farthest explorations are to the bed-rooms; in the
cottages the spirit of enterprise is less. The interior of the island is
an unknown country. The adventurous traveller goes no farther inland
than Tobermory on the east coast, or Bunessan on the west. The ordinary
traveller never goes ashore at all, but in the boat from Oban makes the
tour of Mull in a day. As a consequence, there is no direct
communication between the two sides of the island. It is strange that,
though one of the largest of the Hebrides and within easiest reach of
the main-land, Mull should be one of the least known and civilized. It
is not even settled. People respect Dr. Johnson because in the days when
steamboats were not, and roads at the best were few, he made a journey
to the islands. But we cannot help thinking that if this respect is
measured by hardships, we are far more worthy of it for having followed
him to Mull a century later. Wherever he and Boswell went, guides and
horses, or boats, as the case might be, were at their disposal; the
doors of all the castles and large houses in the islands were thrown
open to them. We were our own guides. It may be said that the steamboat
was at our service, but it could not always take us to places we wished
to see. If Dr. Johnson had to ride over moorland on a pony too small for
him, he was sure that when evening came a Macquarry, a Maclean, or a
Macleod would be eager to make him welcome. We walked on roads, it is
true, but they were bad, and not only were we not wanted at the
castles, but we did not want to go to them since they are now mostly in
ruins; there was chance, too, of our not coming to an inn at nightfall.
The inns of Mull are few and far between. Besides, for all one knows,
those mentioned in the guide-book may be closed. If others have been
opened, there is no one to tell you of them.
[Illustration: COAST OF MULL.]
However, we took the procurator's word for the inn at Ulva, and started
out again with our knapsacks, which seemed but heavier on our backs
after several days' rest. All morning we tramped dreary miles of moor
and hill, with the wind in our faces, and by lochs with endless curves,
around which we had to go, though we saw our journey's end just before
us. While we followed the northern shore of Loch-Na-Keal, high Ben-More,
with its head among the clouds, was behind us. In front was the
Atlantic, with heavy showers passing over it, and now blotting out far
Staffa and the long ridge of the Ross of Mull, an encircling shadow
between the ocean and the headland of Gribun; and now sweeping across
the loch and the near green island of Inch-Kenneth.
A large house, with wide lawn and green fields and well-clipped hedges,
just at the head of Loch-Na-Keal, and one or two small new cottages shut
in with flaming banks of fuchsias, showed what Mull might be if in the
island men were held in as high account as rabbits and grouse. We saw
the many white tails of the rabbits in among the ferns, and though they
live only to be shot, on the whole we thought them better off than the
solemn, silent men and women who trudged by us towards Salen, where it
was market-day, for it is their fate to live only to starve and suffer.
The one man who spoke to us during that long morning was a shepherd,
with a soft gentle voice and foreign Scotch, whose sheep we frightened
up the hill-side.
ULVA
lay so close to the shores of Mull as scarce to seem a separate island.
But the waters of the narrow Sound were rough. The postman, who had just
been ferried over, held the boat as we stepped into it from the slippery
stones of the landing. As he waited, he said not a word. They keep
silence, these people, under the yoke they have borne for generations.
The ferryman was away, and the boy who had come in his place had hard
work to row against wind and waves, and harder work to talk English. "I
beg pardon," was his answer to every question we asked.
The little white inn was just opposite the landing, and we went to it at
once, for it was late and we were hungry. We asked the landlady if she
could give us some meat.
"Of course," she said--and her English was fairly good--she could give
us tea and eggs.
"No, but meat," we repeated.
"Yes, of course," she said again; "tea and eggs."
And we kept on asking for meat, and she kept on promising us tea and
eggs, and I know not how the discussion had ended, if on a sudden it had
not occurred to us that for her the word had none other but its
Scriptural meaning.
While she prepared lunch we sat on low rocks by the boats drawn up high
and dry on the stony beach. At the southern end of the island was Ulva
House, white through an opening in a pleasant wood, and surrounded by
broad green pastures. Just in front of us, close to the inn, a handful
of bare black cottages rose from the mud in among rocks and bowlders. No
paths led to the doors; nothing green grew about the walls. Women with
pinched, care-worn faces came and went, busy with household work, and
they were silent as the people we had met on the road. Beyond was
barrenness; not another tree, not another bit of pasture-land was in
sight. And yet, before the people were brought unto desolation, almost
all the island was green as the meadows about the laird's house; and so
it could be again if men were but allowed to cultivate the ground. Where
weeds and rushes and ferns now cover the hills and the level places were
once fields of grain and grass. To-day only the laird's crops are still
sowed and reaped. Once there could be heard the many voices of men and
women and children at work or at play, where now the only sounds are the
roaring of the waters and the crack of the rifle.[F] Of all the many
townships that were scattered from one end of the island to the other,
there remains but this miserable group of cottages. The people have been
driven from the land they loved, and sent hither and thither, some
across the narrow Sound, others far across the broad Atlantic.
[F] This also has been questioned. All we can say is that we
both saw and heard men in Ulva shooting with rifles. What they were
shooting at we did not go to see.
The Highlands and the Hebrides are lands of romance. There is a legend
for almost every step you take. But the cruelest of these are not so
cruel as, and none have the pathos of, the tales of their own and their
fathers' wrongs and wretchedness which the people tell to-day. The old
stories of the battle-field, and of clan meeting clan in deadly duel,
have given way to stories of the clearing of the land that the laird or
the stranger might have his shooting and fishing, as well as his crops.
At first the people could not understand it. The evicted in Ulva went to
the laird, as they would have gone of old, and asked for a new home. And
what was his answer? "I am not the father of your family." And then,
when frightened women ran and hid themselves at his coming, he broke the
kettles they left by the well, or tore into shreds the clothes bleaching
on the heather. And as the people themselves have it, "in these and
similar ways he succeeded too well in clearing the island of its once
numerous inhabitants, scattering them over the face of the globe." There
must have been cruelty indeed before the Western Islander, who once
loved his chief better than his own life, could tell such tales as
these, even in his hunger and despair.
[Illustration: ROSS OF MULL, LOOKING TOWARDS IONA.]