reputable gentleman, living on their estate, as he walked in the
fields before sunset, he saw a neighbouring person, who had been sick
for a long time, coming that way, accompanied by another man; and, as
they drew nearer, he asked them some questions, and how far they
intended to go. The first answered they were to travel forward to a
village he named, and then pursued his journey with a more than
ordinary pace. Next day, early in the morning, he was invited to his
neighbour's interment, which surprised him much, as he had seen and
spoke with him the evening before; but was told by the messenger that
came for him, the deceased person had been confined to his bed for
seven weeks, and that he departed this life a little before sunset,
much about the time he saw him in a vision the preceding day."
"Margaret Macleod, an honest woman advanced in years, informed me
that when she was a young woman in the family of Grishornish, a
dairy-maid, who daily used to herd the calves in a park close to the
house, observed, at different times, a woman resembling herself in
shape and attire, walking solitarily at no great distance from her;
and being surprised at the apparition, to make further trial, she put
the back part of her garment foremost, and anon the phantom was
dressed in the same manner, which made her uneasy, believing it
portended some fatal consequence to herself. In a short time
thereafter she was seized with a fever, which brought her to her end;
but before her sickness, and on her deathbed, declared this second
sight to several."
"Neil Betton, a sober, judicious person, and elder in the session of
Diurinish, informed me, as he had it from the deceased Mr Kenneth
Betton, late minister in Trotternish, that a farmer in the village of
Airaidh, on the west side of the country, being towards evening to
quit his work, he observed a traveller coming towards him as he stood
close to the highway; and, as he knew the man, waited his coming up;
but when he began to speak with him, the traveller broke off the road
abruptly to the shore that was hard by; which, how soon he entered,
he gave a loud cry; and, having proceeded on the shore, gave a loud
cry at the middle of it, and so went on until he came to a river
running through the middle of it, which he no sooner entered than he
gave a third cry, and then saw him no more. On the farmer's coming
home he told all that he had heard and seen to those of his
household: so the story spread, until from hand to hand it came to
the person's own knowledge, who, having seen the farmer afterwards,
inquired of him narrowly about it, who owned and told the same as
above. In less than a year thereafter, the same man, going with two
more to cut wattling for creels, in Coille-na-Skiddil, he and they
were drowned in the river where he heard him give the last cry."
"Some of the inhabitants of Harris sailing round the Isle of Skye,
with a design to go to the opposite mainland, were strangely
surprised with an apparition of two men hanging down by the ropes
that secured the mast, but could not conjecture what it meant. They
pursued the voyage; but the wind turned contrary, and so forced them
into Broadford, in the Isle of Skye, where they found Sir Donald
Macdonald keeping a sheriff's court, and two criminals receiving
sentence of death there. The ropes and masts of that very boat were
made use of to hang those criminals."
[Sidenote: Death sights and omens.]
Such are some of the stories laboriously gathered together and set
down in perfect good faith by Theophilus Insulanus. It will be seen
that they are loosely reported, are always at second or third hand,
and that, if the original teller of the stories could be placed in
the witness-box, a strict cross-examination would make sad havoc with
him and them. But although sufficiently ridiculous and foolish in
themselves, they exemplify the strange ghostly atmosphere which
pervades the western islands. Every one of the people amongst whom I
now live believes in apparitions and the second sight. Mr M'Ian has
seen a ghost himself, but he will not willingly speak about it. A
woman gifted with the second sight dwells in one of the smoking turf
huts on the shore. At night, round a precipitous rock that overhangs
the sea, about a hundred yards from the house, a light was often seen
to glide, and evil was apprehended. For years the patient light
abode there. At last a boy, the son of one of the cotters, climbing
about the rock, missed his footing, fell into the sea and was
drowned, and from that hour the light was never more visible. At a
ford up amongst the hills, the people tell me doleful cries have been
heard at intervals for years. The stream has waited long for its
victim, but I am assured that it will get it at last. That a man
will yet be drowned there is an article of faith amongst the cotters.
But who? I suspect _I_ am regarded as the likely person. Perhaps
the withered crone down in the turf hut yonder knows the features of
the doomed man. This prevailing superstitious feeling takes curious
possession of one somehow. You cannot live in a ghostly atmosphere
without being more or less affected by it. Lying a-bed you don't
like to hear the furniture of your bedroom creak. At sunset you are
suspicious of the prodigious shadow that stalks alongside of you
across the gold-green fields. You become more than usually impressed
by the multitudinous and unknown voices of the night. Gradually you
get the idea that you and nature are alien; and it is in that feeling
of alienation that superstition lives.
[Sidenote: Father M'Crimmon's story.]
Father M'Crimmon and I had been out rabbit-shooting, and, tired of
the sport, we sat down to rest on a grassy knoll. The ghostly island
stories had taken possession of my mind, and as we sat and smoked I
inquired if the priest was a believer in ghosts generally and in the
second sight in particular. The gaunt, solemn-voiced,
melancholy-eyed man replied that he believed in the existence of
ghosts just as he believed in the existence of America--he had never
seen America, he had never seen a ghost, but the existence of both he
considered was amply borne out by testimony. "I know there is such a
thing as the second sight," he went on, "because I have had
cognisance of it myself. Six or seven years ago I was staying with
my friend Mr M'Ian, as I am staying now, and just as we were sipping
a tumbler of punch after dinner we heard a great uproar outside. We
went out and found all the farm-servants standing on the grass and
gazing seawards. On inquiry, we learned that two brothers, M'Millan
by name, who lived down at Stonefield, beyond the point yonder,
fishermen by trade, and well versed in the management of a boat, had
come up to the islands here to gather razor-fish for bait. When they
had secured plenty of bait, they steered for home, although a stiff
breeze was blowing. They kept a full sail on, and went straight on
the wind. A small boy, Hector, who was employed in herding cows, was
watching the boat trying to double the point. All at once he came
running into the kitchen where the farm-servants were at dinner.
'Men, men,' he cried, 'come out fast; M'Millan's boat is sinking--I
saw her heel over.' Of course the hinds came rushing out bareheaded,
and it was the noise they made that disturbed my friend and myself at
our punch. All this we gathered in less time than I have taken to
tell you. We looked narrowly seaward, but no boat was to be seen.
Mr M'Ian brought out his telescope, and still the sea remained
perfectly blue and bare. Neither M'Ian nor his servants could be
brought to believe Hector's story--they thought it extremely unlikely
that on a comparatively calm day any harm could befall such
experienced sailors. It was universally agreed that the boat _had_
rounded the point, and Mr M'Ian rated the herd-boy for raising a
false alarm. Hector still persisting that he had seen the boat
capsize and go down, got his cars soundly boxed for his obstinacy,
and was sent whimpering away to his cows, and enjoined in future to
mind his own business. Then the servants returned to their dinner in
the kitchen, and, going back with me to our punch, which had become
somewhat cold, Mr M'Ian resumed his story of the eagle that used to
come down the glen in the early mornings and carry away his poultry,
and told how he shot it at last and found that it measured six feet
from wing-tip to wing-tip.
"But although Hector got his ears boxed it turned out that he had in
all probability spoken the truth. Towards the evening of next day
the M'Millan sisters came up to the house to inquire after the boat,
which had never reached home. The poor girls were in a dreadful
state when they were told that their brothers' boat had left the
islands the previous afternoon, and what Hector the cow-herd averred
he had seen. Still there was room for hope; it was possible that
Hector was mistaken, it was possible that the M'Millans might have
gone somewhere, or been forced to take shelter somewhere--and so the
two sisters, mustering up the best heart they could, went across the
hill to Stonefield when the sun was setting, and the sea a sheet of
gold leaf, and looking as it could never be angry or have the heart
to drown anything.
"Days passed, and the boat never came home, nor did the brothers. It
was on Friday that the M'Millans sailed away on the fresh breeze, and
on the Wednesday following the bay down there was a sorry sight. The
missing sailors were brave, good-looking, merry-hearted, and were
liked along the whole coast; and on the Wednesday I speak of no fewer
than two hundred and fifty boats were sailing slowly up and down,
crossing and re-crossing, trawling for the bodies. I remember the
day perfectly. It was dull and sultry, with but little sunshine; the
hills over there (Blaavin and the others) were standing dimly in a
smoke of heat; and on the smooth pallid sea the mournful multitude of
black boats were moving slowly up and down, across and back again.
In each boat two men pulled, and the third sat in the stern with the
trawling-irons. The day was perfectly still, and I could hear
through the heated air the solemn pulses of the oars. The bay was
black with the slowly-crawling boats. A sorry sight," said the good
priest, filling his second pipe from a tobacco-pouch made of otter's
skin.
"I don't know how it was," went on the Father, holding his
newly-filled pipe between his forefinger and thumb; "but looking on
the black dots of boats, and hearing the sound of their oars, I
remembered that old Mirren, who lived in one of the turf huts yonder,
had the second sight; and so I thought I would go down and see her.
When I got to the hut, I met Mirren coming up from the shore with a
basket full of whelks, which she had been gathering for dinner. I
went into the hut along with her, and sat down. 'There's a sad
business in the bay to-day,' said I. 'A sad business,' said Mirren,
as she laid down her basket. 'Will they get the bodies?' Mirren
shook her head. 'The bodies are not there to get; they have floated
out past Rum to the main ocean.' 'How do you know?' 'Going out to
the shore about a month ago I heard a scream, and, looking up, saw a
boat off the point, with two men in it, caught in a squall, and going
down. When the boat sank the men still remained in it--the one
entangled in the fishing-net, the other in the ropes of the sails. I
saw them float out to the main sea between the two wines,'--that's a
literal translation," said the Father, parenthetically. "You have
seen two liquors in a glass--the one floating on the top of the
other? Very well; there are two currents in the sea, and when my
people wish to describe anything sinking down and floating between
these two currents, they use the image of two liquors in a
wine-glass. Oh, it's a fine language the Gaelic, and admirably
adapted for poetical purposes,--but to return. Mirren told me that
she saw the bodies float out to sea between the two wines, and that
the trawling boats might trawl for ever in the bay before they would
get what they wanted. When evening came, the boats returned home
without having found the bodies of the drowned M'Millans. Well," and
here the Father lighted his pipe, "six weeks after, a capsized boat
was thrown on the shore in Uist, with two corpses inside,--one
entangled in the fishing-net, the other in the ropes of the sails.
It was the M'Millans' boat, and it was the two brothers who were
inside. Their faces were all eaten away by the dog-fishes; but the
people who had done business with them in Uist identified them by
their clothes. This I know to be true," said the Father
emphatically, and shutting the door on all argument or hint of
scepticism. "And now, if you are not too tired, suppose we try our
luck in the copses down there? 'Twas a famous place for rabbits when
I was here last year."
_IN A SKYE BOTHY._
I am quite alone here. England may have been invaded and London
sacked, for aught I know. Several weeks since a newspaper,
accidentally blown to my solitude, informed me that the _Great
Eastern_, with the second American telegraphic cable on board, had
got under way, and was about to proceed to sea. There is great joy,
I perceive. Human nature stands astonished at itself--felicitates
itself on its remarkable talent, and will for months to come
complacently purr over its achievement in magazines and reviews. A
fine world, messieurs, that will attain to heaven--if in the power of
steam. A very fine world; yet for all that, I have withdrawn from it
for a time, and would rather not hear of its remarkable exploits. In
my present mood, I do not value them the coil of vapour on the brow
of Blaavin, which, as I gaze, smoulders into nothing in the fire of
sunrise.
Goethe informs us that in his youth he loved to shelter himself in
the Scripture narratives from the marching and counter-marching of
armies, the cannonading, fighting, and retreating, that went on
everywhere around him. He shut his eyes, as it were, and a whole
war-convulsed Europe wheeled away into silence and distance; and in
its place, lo! the patriarchs, with their tawny tents, their
man-servants and maid-servants, and countless flocks in perceptible
procession whitening the Syrian plains. In this, my green solitude,
I appreciate the full sweetness of the passage. Everything here is
silent as the Bible plains themselves. I am cut off from former
scenes and associates as by the sullen Styx and the grim ferrying of
Charon's boat. The noise of the world does not touch me. I live too
far inland to hear the thunder of the reef. To this place no postman
comes; no tax-gatherer. This region never heard the sound of the
church-going bell. The land is Pagan as when the yellow-haired
Norseman landed a thousand years ago. I almost feel a Pagan myself.
Not using a notched stick, I have lost all count of time, and don't
know Saturday from Sunday. Civilisation is like a soldier's stock,
it makes you carry your head a good deal higher, makes the angels
weep a little more at your fantastic tricks, and half suffocates you
the while. I have thrown it away, and breathe freely. My bed is the
heather, my mirror the stream from the hills, my comb and brush the
sea breeze, my watch the sun, my theatre the sunset, and my evening
service--not without a rude natural religion in it--watching the
pinnacles of the hills of Cuchullin sharpening in intense purple
against the pallid orange of the sky, or listening to the melancholy
voices of the sea-birds and the tide; that over, I am asleep, till
touched by the earliest splendour of the dawn. I am, not without
reason, hugely enamoured of my vagabond existence.
[Sidenote: In a Skye bothy.]
My bothy is situated on the shores of one of the Lochs that intersect
Skye. The coast is bare and rocky, hollowed into fantastic chambers;
and when the tide is making, every cavern murmurs like a sea-shell.
The land, from frequent rain, green as emerald, rises into soft
pastoral heights, and about a mile inland soars suddenly up into
peaks of bastard marble, white as the cloud under which the lark
sings at noon, and bathed in rosy light at sunset. [Sidenote: The
Cuchullins.] In front are the Cuchullin hills and the monstrous peak
of Blaavin; then the green strath runs narrowing out to sea, and the
Island of Rum, with a white cloud upon it, stretches like a gigantic
shadow across the entrance of the loch, and completes the scene.
Twice every twenty-four hours the Atlantic tide sets in upon the
hollowed shores; twice is the sea withdrawn, leaving spaces of smooth
sand on which mermaids, with golden combs, might sleek alluring
tresses; and black rocks, heaped with brown dulse and tangle, and
lovely ocean blooms of purple and orange; and bare islets--marked at
full of tide by a glimmer of pale green amid the universal
sparkle--where most the sea-fowl love to congregate. To these
islets, on favourable evenings, come the crows, and sit in sable
parliament; business despatched, they start into air as at a gun, and
stream away through the sunset to their roosting-place in the
Armadale woods. The shore supplies for me the place of books and
companions. Of course Blaavin and the Cuchullin hills are the chief
attractions, and I never weary watching them. In the morning they
wear a great white caftan of mist; but that lifts away before noon,
and they stand with all their scars and passionate torrent-lines bare
to the blue heavens, with perhaps a solitary shoulder for a moment
gleaming wet to the sunlight. After a while a vapour begins to steam
up from their abysses, gathering itself into strange shapes, knotting
and twisting itself like smoke; while above, the terrible crests are
now lost, now revealed, in a stream of flying rack. In an hour a
wall of rain, gray as granite, opaque as iron to the eye, stands up
from sea to heaven. The loch is roughening before the wind, and the
islets, black dots a second ago, are patches of roaring foam. You
hear fierce sound of its coming. Anon, the lashing tempest sweeps
over you, and looking behind, up the long inland glen, you can see
the birch-woods and over the sides of the hills, driven on the wind,
the white smoke of the rain. Though fierce as a charge of Highland
bayonets these squalls are seldom of long duration, and you bless
them when you creep from your shelter, for out comes the sun, and the
birch-woods are twinkling, and more intensely flash the levels of the
sea, and at a stroke the clouds are scattered from the wet brow of
Blaavin, and to the whole a new element has been added; the voice of
the swollen stream as it rushes red over a hundred tiny cataracts,
and roars river-broad into the sea, making turbid the azure. Then I
have my amusements in this solitary place. The mountains are of
course open, and this morning, at dawn, a roe swept past me like the
wind, with its nose to the dewy ground--"tracking," they call it
here. Above all, I can wander on the ebbed beach. Hogg speaks of
that
"Undefined and mingled hum,
Voice of the desert, never dumb."
But far more than the murmuring and insecty air of the moorland does
the wet _chirk-chirking_ of the living shore give one the idea of
crowded and multitudinous life. [Sidenote: Hunting razor-fish.] Did
the reader ever hunt razor-fish?--not sport like tiger-hunting, I
admit; yet it has its pleasures and excitements, and can kill a
forenoon for an idle man agreeably. On the wet sands yonder the
razor-fish are spouting like the fountains at Versailles on _fête_
day. The shy fellow sinks on discharging his watery _feu de joie_.
If you are quickly after him through the sand, you catch him, and
then comes the tug of war. Address and dexterity are required. If
you pull vigorously, he slips out of his sheath a "mother-naked"
mollusc, and escapes. If you do your spiriting gently, you drag him
up to light, a long thin case, with a white fishy bulb protruding at
one end like a root. Rinse him in sea water, toss him into your
basket, and plunge after another watery flash. These razor-fish are
excellent eating, the people say, and when used as bait no fish that
swims the ocean stream--cod, whiting, haddock, flat skate,
broad-shouldered crimson bream--no, not the detested dog-fish
himself, this summer swarming in every Loch and becursed by every
fisherman--can keep himself off the hook, and in an hour your boat is
laden with glittering spoil. Then, if you take your gun to the low
islands--and you can go dry-shod at ebb of tide--you have your chance
of sea-fowl. Gulls of all kinds are there, dookers and divers of
every description, flocks of shy curlews, and specimens of a hundred
tribes to which my limited ornithological knowledge cannot furnish a
name. The solan goose yonder falls from heaven into the water like a
meteor-stone. See the solitary scart, with long narrow wing and
outstretched neck, shooting towards some distant promontory. Anon,
high above head, come wheeling a covey of lovely sea-swallows. You
fire, one flutters down, never more to skim the horizon or to dip in
the sea-sparkle. Lift it up; is it not beautiful? The wild, keen
eye is closed, but you see the delicate slate-colour of the wings,
and the long tail-feathers white as the creaming foam. There is a
stain of blood on the breast, hardly brighter than the scarlet of its
beak and feet. Lay it down, for its companions are dashing round and
round, uttering harsh cries of rage and sorrow; and had you the
heart, you could shoot them one by one. At ebb of tide wild-looking
children, from turf cabins on the hill-side, come down to hunt
shell-fish. Even now a troop is busy; how their shrill voices go the
while! [Sidenote: Old Effie.] Old Effie I see is out to-day, quite a
picturesque object, with her white cap and red shawl. With a tin can
in one hand, an old reaping-hook in the other, she goes poking among
the tangle. Let us see what sport she has had. She turns round at
our salutation--very old, old almost as the worn rocks around. She
might have been the wife of Wordsworth's "Leech-gatherer." Her can
is sprawling with brown crabs; and, opening her apron, she exhibits a
large black and blue lobster--a fellow such as she alone can capture.
A queer woman is Effie, and an awesome. She is familiar with ghosts
and apparitions. She can relate legends that have power over the
superstitious blood, and with little coaxing will sing those wild
Gaelic songs of hers--of dead lights on the sea, of fishing-boats
going down in squalls, of unburied bodies tossing day and night upon
the gray peaks of the waves, and of girls that pray God to lay them
by the sides of their drowned lovers, although for them should never
rise mass nor chant, and although their flesh should be torn asunder
by the wild fishes of the sea.