REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS
OF AN
OCTOGENARIAN HIGHLANDER
REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS
OF AN
OCTOGENARIAN HIGHLANDER.
By DUNCAN CAMPBELL,
Who was for over a6 years Editor of the "Northern Chronicle," Inverness.
485581
Inverness :
THE NORTHERN COUNTIES NEWSPAPER AND PRINTING AND PUBLISHING COMPANY, LIMITED.
1910.
-DP)
8'fc
CONTENTS.
PAGE.
List of Subscribers ........ xi.
PART l.—TUE FARM HFK I'ERlOD.
CHAPTER I. Early Days • 1
CHAPTER II. Luchd-Siubliail : or Uangrel Bodies . . . . . -Jl
CHAPTER HI. Big Duncan the Kool . 34
CHAPTER IV. Tempora Mutantur ........ 45
CHAPTER V. Education and the Church of Scotland . . 50
CHAPTER VI. Scoti Vagi ........ 52
CHAPTER VII. Glenlyou and its Neighbourhood ..... 56
CHAPTER VIII. Some Parish History ....... 62
CHAPTER IX. Cursory Remarks on the Ossianie Controversy . . .72
CHAPTER X. The Unwieldy Parish Divided into Three .... 74
CHAPTER XI. Religious Revival ........ 76
CHAPTER XII. Social Life and Morals . . . . . . .81
CHAPTER XIII. The Highland Landlords 88
CHAPTER XIV. Francie Mor Mac an Aba ....... 98
VI. CONTENTS.
|
CHAPTER XV. Disappearance of Old Landed Families — Much Regretted |
PAOS. . 106 |
|
CHAPTER XVI. Patriotism and Politics ...... |
. 110 |
|
CHAPTER XVII. The Brcadalbane Evictions ..... |
. 117 |
|
CHAPTER XVIII. The Purling of the Ways ...... |
. 121 |
|
CHAPTER XIX. The Church Controversy in Glenlyon |
. 125 |
|
CHAPTER XX. The Outside Discussions ...... |
. 130 |
|
CHAPTER XXI. The Veto Act |
. 133 |
|
CHAPTER XX11. The Coming of the yueen .... |
. 136 |
|
CHAPTER XXIII. A Parish Vacancy |
137 |
|
CHAPTER XXIV. The Presentee |
. 139 |
|
CHAPTER XXV. On the Edge of the Precipice |
. 143 |
|
CHAPTER XXVI. The Disruption |
150 |
|
CHAPTER XXVII. The Glenlyon Free Church |
. 155 |
|
CHAPTER XXVIII. The Broken Walls of the National Zion |
. 163 |
|
CHAPTER XXIX. The Eccentric Minister .... |
169 |
|
CHAPTER XXX. Eviction .... |
174 |
|
CHAPTER XXXI. Farewell to the Old industrial System . . , .. |
. 186 |
|
CHAPTER XXXII. Emigration |
. 195 |
|
CHAPTER XXXIII. A Scramble for Higher Education .... |
208 |
CONTENTS. Vll.
PART II.— THE SCHOLASTIC PERIOD.
CHAPTER XXXIV. PAGE.
Kerrumore School . ...... 223
CHAPTER XXXV. Cargill 226
CHAPTER XXXVI. An Unexpected Event 232
CHAPTER XXXVII. Fortingall ... 238
CHAPTER XXXVIII. A Population of many Surnames ..... 247
CHAPTER XXXIX. FeillCeit 251
CHAPTER XL. Remarks on Parish of Fortingall Church and Affairs . . 256
CHAPTER XLI. A Disputed Settlement — Lord Aberdeen's Act . . . 263
CHAPTER XLII. A Remove .... . 272
CHAPTER XLIII. Balquhidder ... .274
CHAPTER XLIV. Civil History Notes .... . 276
CHAPTER XLV. The Patron Saint .... .284
CHAPTER XLVI. Two Notable Balquhidder Ministers . . . 287
CHAPTER XLVII. Balquhidder in 1857-60 ... .298
CHAPTER XLVIII. Proprietors .....
CHAPTER XLIX. Conditions of Parish and People . . .311
CHAPTER L. Another Remove . . .
CHAPTER LI. Off to England . . . ... • • -320
Vlll. CONTENTS.
PART III.— JOURNALISTIC.
CHAPTER LII. PAOK.
In Bradford . . . 325
CHAPTER L1H. Rumbling Ethnological Remarks ..... 328
CHAPTER LIV. The (Iroat Change and some of its Causes .... 331
CHAPTER LV. Strangers within the (iates ...... 334
CHAPTER LVi. The Native regulation .... . 341
CHAPTER LVII. Religion .......... 345
CHAI'TER LVlll. Education . 360
CHAI'TER LIX. Musing* without Method ....... 368
CHAI'TER LX. The Lauded Gentry ... ... 381
CHAPTER IAI. ('lasses and Masses ...... . 390
CHAPTER IAII. Political Currents and Eddies ... . 409
CHAPTER LXII1. London . . ..... 4iy
CHAPTER LX1V. Off to South Africa . ... . 425
CHAPTER LXV, At Cape Town . .... 428
CHAPTER LXVI. Visitors of many Nations and Races . . 430
CHAPTER LXV1I. The Position of the Ruling Race . 435
The Boers ...... 440
CHAPTER LXIX. The Britons . . ... 447
CHAPTER LXX. Afloat again
CONTENTS. IX.
CHAPTER LXXI. PAGE.
Breakdown . 470
CHAPTER LXXII. At Thwaites House .... 473
CHAPTER LXXII I. Neighbours and Incidents . . 483
CHAPTER LXXIV. The Anti-Vaccinnation Agitation . 495
CHAPTER LXXV. Keighley Parties and Politics . . 498
CHAPTER LXXVI. Farewell to England . . .513
CHAPTER LXXV1I. Back to Scotland . . .521
CHAPTER LXXVIll. " The Northern Chronicle " ... 529
CHAPTER LXX1X. The Procession of Changes . 531
CHAPTER LXXX. Land and People • 5 36
CHAPTER LXXXI. The Latter Days' Invasions of the Highlands . . 538
CHAPTER LXXXI I. Deer Forests and Sheep Farms . .540
CHAPTER LXXXI1L The Crofters . . 556
CHAPTER LXXXIV. The Cry of " Back to the Land " . 577
CHAPTER LXXXV. The Restlessness of the Present Age . . 583
CHAPTER LXXXVI. The Urban Invasion of the Country . . 589
CHAPTER LXXXVII. Presbyterian Divisions . . 596
CHAPTER LXXXVIII. Some Pleas on behalf of the National Union of Scotch
Presbyterians . . . . • • .619
LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS.
Aberdeen University, per Mr P. J. Anderson, Librarian.
Aitken, Mrs, 3 Ardross Street, Inverness.
Anderson, Rev. James, Manse of Alvey, Aviemore.
Ashton, Mr A. J., 35 Kersland Street, Glasgow.
Barber, Mr William, 8 Cunliffe Terrace, Bradford, Yorks.
Barron, Mr James, Editor, Courier, Inverness (large paper).
Baxter, Mrs, Ellachie, Craigellachie.
Benn, Mrs H., Holcombe Hall, Dawlish, S. Devon (large
paper).
Bethell, Mr W., Rise Park, Hull (large paper). Billows & Coy., Printers, Keighley (for the Free Library jf
Keighley).
Brigg, Sir John, M.P., Keighley, Yorks. Burgess, Mr A., Banker, Gairloch (large paper). Burns, Mr William, Solicitor, Druinmond Hill, Invernesi
(large paper).
Cameron, Dr A. C., LL.D., 10 Greenbank Terrace, Edin- burgh.
Cameron, Rev. Allan, Netherwood, Inverness. Cameron, Professor J. Kennedy, for Free Church College
Library, Edinburgh.
Cameron, Mr John, Bookseller, Union Street, Inverness. Campbell, Mrs, Daldorch, Catrine, Ayrshire. Campbell, Mr Alexander J., J.P., Boreland Farm, Fenian,
Lochtay (large paper).
Campbell, Mr D., Postmaster, Fowlis, Crieff, Perthshire. Campbell, Mr Duncan, Balnacraig, Fortingall, by Aberfeldy
(large paper). Campbell, Mr George, Lutembwe Farm, Fort Jameson, N.E.
Rhodesia (large paper).
Campbell, Dr James, LL.D., Old Cullen, Cullen. Campbell, Rev. John, The Manse, Kirkcaldy. Campbell, Mr Robert, Ku Wiro-Wiro, Fort Jameson, N.E.
Rhodesia (large paper). Campbell, Rev. W., Manse of Fortingall, by Aberfeldy (large
paper) .
xii. LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS.
Campbell, Mr William, Craigneish, Bowden, Alberta, Canada.
Chisholm, Mr John, Ness House, Inverness.
Christie, Mr J. S., Royal Hotel, Inverness.
Clarke, Major Seymour, Cameron Highlanders, Aldershot.
Currie, Sir Donald, of Garth, G.C.M.G., Aberfeldy (1 octavo,
1 large paper).
Davidson, Mr Andrew, Sculptor, Inverness. Dewar, Sir John A., Abercairney, Cried (large paper). Douglas & Foulis, Booksellers, 9 Castle Street, Edinburgh. Edinburgh Public Library, per Hew Morrison, LL.D. Fraser, Mr Alexander, of Messrs A. Fraser & Coy., Union
Street, Inverness.
Fraser, Mr D., 299u Mitre, Buenos Ayres. Fraser, Miss Kate, 42 Union Street, Inverness. Gorrie, Mr Peter, Post-Office House, Glenlyon, Aberfeldy. Gossip, Provost, Knowsley, Inverness. Goyder, Dr, Bradford, Yorkshire Grant Bros., Printers, Kingussie. Grant, Mr R. M., .\nrlltern Chronicle Office, Inverness (large
paper).
Guthrie, Mr Donald, K.C., Guelph, Canada. Haggart, Mr James D., Manufacturer, Aberfeldy (large
paper).
Haggart, Rev. John, D.D., Lochcarrou. Uugonin, Mrs, Alton House, Ballifeary, Inverness (large
paper). Ingham, Mr Charles B., Moira House, Eastbourne (large
paper).
Inglis, Mr George, of Newmore, luvergordou. Inverness Public Library, per Mr George Smith Laing,
Assistant Secretary (1 octavo, 1 large paper). King-Church, Mrs, Clive Lodge, Albury, Guildford, Surrey
(large paper).
Kinnaird, Mr John, Birnani, Perthshire (large paper). Laing, Mr George Smith, Town House, Inverness. Larnond, Mr Charles, 9 Ardross Terrace, Inverness (large
paper) .
Lang, Rev. Gavin, Mayfield, Inverness. Logan, Mr James, Planefield, Planefield Road, Inverness. MacAulay, Mr Alfred N., Solicitor, Golspie (large paper). Macbean, Miss, 8 Ardross Street, Inverness. Macbean, Mr Lachlau, Tomatin (large paper).
LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS. Xlll.
Maccallum, Mr H. V., Solicitor, Inverness (large paper). Macculloch, Mr James D., 272 St Vincent Street, Glasgow. Macdonald, Dr Allan, LL.D., Glenarm, Co. Antrim. Macdonald, Mr Andrew, Sheriff Clerk, Inverness. M'Donald, Mr D., Northern Chronicle Office, Inverness (large
paper).
Macdonald, Mr D., Glencoe, Fairfield Road, Inverness. Macdonald, Mr Ewen, Flesher, Inverness. Macdonald, Mr H., Meggernie Estates Office, Aberfeldy. Macdonald, Mr James, Northern Chronicle Office, Inverness
(large paper).
Macdonald, Mr Kenneth, Town Clerk, Inverness (large paper). Macdonald, Mr Ronald, Solicitor, Portree. Macdonald, Mr W., Carpenter, George Street, Inverness. Macdiarmid, Mr D., Bank of Scotland House, Aberfeldy
(large paper).
Macgill, Mr W., B.A., Tain (large paper). Macintyre, Mr Donald, Hilton P.O., British Columbia. Maciver, Rev. Angus, F.C. Manse, Strathconon, Muir of Orel Mackay, Mr Andrew, Kettering (large paper). Mackay, Miss J. A., Silverwells, Inverness (large paper). Mackay, Mr Thomas A., 9 St Vincent Street, Edinburgh
(large paper). Mackay, Mr William, Solicitor, 19 Union Street, Inverness
(large paper).
Mackay, Mr William, Bookseller, High Street, Inverness. Mackenzie, Dr F. M., Glenoran, Inverness. Mackenzie, Mr George, Seaforth Lodge, Balliefeary, Inverness
(large paper).
Mackenzie, Mr N. B., Solicitor, Fort- William. Mackenzie, Mr Osgood H., of Inverewe, Poolewe. Mackenzie, Mr Thomas, Dailuaine House, Carron, Morayshire. Mackenzie, Mr William, Clothier, Inverness. Mackintosh of Mackintosh, The, Moy Hall, Moy (large
paper).
Mackintosh, Dr Arthur, Chorley, Lancashire. Mackintosh, Mr John, Southwood, Inverness. Mackintosh, Mr Neil D., of Raigmore, Inverness (large paper). Macleod, The Very Rev. Norman, D.D., 74 Murrayfield
Gardens, Edinburgh. Macleod, Sir Reginald, K.C.B., Vinters, Maidstone (per Mr
N. Macleod, Bookseller, Edinburgh).
XIV. LIST OP SUBSCRIBERS.
Macrae, Rev. Alexander, M.A., 26 Park Road, Wandsworth
Common, London, S.W.
Macrae, Mr Duncan, Ardintoul, Kyle, Lochalsh. Mactavish, Mr Duncan, Moray House, Inverness. Malcolm, Mr George, Factor, Invergarry (large paper). Matheson, Mr Gilbert A., 46 Union Street, Inverness (large
paper) . Maufe, Mr Charles J., Homecraft, Ilkley, Yorkshire (large
paper). Maufe, Mr Frederic B., Warlbeck, Ilkley, Yorkshire (1
octavo, 1 large paper). Maufe, Mr Henry, The Red House, Bexley Heath, Yorkshire
(large paper).
Medlock, Mr Arthur, Jeweller, 6 Bridge Street, Inverness. Meldrum, Rev. A., M.A., .T.P., Manse of Loggierait, Ballin-
luig, Perthshire (large paper). Menzies, Lieut. -Colonel Duncan, Blairich, Rogart, Sutherland
(large paper) Moore, Mr T. H.. Thornhill Villa. Marsh, Huddersfield (large
paper).
Morrison, Mrs, 15 Southside Road, Inverness (large paper). Moss, Sir John Edwards, Bart., Roby Hall, Torquay (largo
paper) .
Munro, Sir Henry, Nessmount, Inverness. Nairn, Sir Michael B., Bart.. Kirkcaldy (4 octavo, 1 large
paper) .
Oberbeck, Mr Carl, Alexandra Hotel, Inverness. Ogston, Mr W., Chemist, Atherstone, Fairfield Road, Inver- ness. Parish Library of Balquhiddor, per Mr John M'Laren, Hon.
Secretary.
Perrins, Mrs Dyson, Davenham, Malvern. Porritt, Mrs Caroline, 53 Park Road, St Anne's-on-Sea,
Lancashire.
Proudfoot, Miss, 1 Central Avenue, Partick, Glasgow. Reaney, Mrs, 24 Ranclagh Road, Baling, London, W. (large
paper).
Reid, Mr R., Postmaster, Stirling (large paper). Reid, Mr R. J., Brazil (per W. Dawson & Sons, Cannon
House, Breams Buildings, London, E.G. Rhodes, Major, Eastwood, Inverness (large paper). Richardson, Mr R., Poppleton Hall, York (large paper).
LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS. XV.
Rose, Mr A., Amo Tea Estate, Chandpur, Bagan, Sylhet,
India (large paper).
Ross, Mr David, Solicitor, 63 Church Street, Inverness. Ross, Mr John M., Hakalau Plantation Company, Hawaii,
H.S. Russell, Rev. J. C., D.D., 9 Coates' Garden, Edinburgh
(large paper). Signet Library, Edinburgh (Mr John Minto, Librarian), per
Mr George P. Johnston, Bookseller, 17 George Street,
Edinburgh.
Sinclair, Lady, Alton House, Inverness. Sinton, Rev. T., The Manse, Dores. Stewart, Mr Donald, Westbourne P.O., Manitoba, Canada
(large paper). Stewart, Mr R., c/o Mr R. Tomlinson, Chancery Lane,
Pietermaritzburg (large paper). Strathcona, Lord, 28 Grosvenor Square, London, W. (large
paper) .
Strother, Dr, Balmachree, Petty.
Stuart, Mrs, of Dalness, Taynuilt, Argyle (large paper). Stuart, Mr Robert, The Hotel, Fortingall, by Aberfeldy
(large paper).
Sykes, Mr Frank, Brookfield, Cheadle, Cheshire. The Mitchell Library, per Mr F. J. Barrett, City Librarian,
21 Miller Street, Glasgow. Tomlinson, Mr R., Hillcrest, Pietermaritzburg, Natal (large
paper).
Urquhart, Mr F., Achanor, Inverness (large paper). Watson, Dr W. J., M.A., B.A. (Oxon.), LL.D., Rector of
the Royal High School, Edinburgh. Wilson, Mr T. A., General Manager, Highland Railway,
Inverness (large paper).
Wimberley, Captain, Ardross Terrace, Inverness. Wordie, Mr John, 75 West Nile Street, Glasgow (large paper). Wordie, Mr Peter, Millersneuk, Lenzie. Young, Mr David, Bank of Scotland, High Street, Inverness
(large paper). Yule, Miss A. F., Tarradale House, Muir of Ord.
REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS
BY
AN OCTOGENARIAN HIGHLANDER.
PART FIRST.— THE FARM LIFE PERIOD.
CHAPTER I.
EARLY DAYS.
I WAS born at Kerrumore in Glenlyon, where my father was a farmer, on the morning of the ninth of February, 1828, when a snowstorm was raging so fiercely that Dr Macarthur and my uncle Archibald, who had been sent for him, had, with their horses, some difficulty in crossing Larig-an-Lochain from Killin. My memory of local occurrences and of self-mental impressions becomes continuous and tenacious at five years of age, when I could read the Gospel narrative fluently in English, which to us Glen children was much like a foreign language, and more haltingly in the Gaelic vernacular because of its system of spelling and the many dead letters thereby entailed. At six I could pass, after sunset and in the darkness of night, St Bran's old church- yard near our house, without, as I often did before, using the Lord's Prayer or bits of psalms and hymns as a protection against ghosts. I had also long before this ceased to speculate on the
2 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
possibility of reaching a hand to the stars when they seemed to crowd down on the sharp ridge of the opposite hill and to hide themselves behind it. Having been once taken up the side- glen to the shealings and allowed to remain there for some time, I widened my knowledge and got rid of much infantile awe of the wonders of my expanding world, by wandering away to a mountain top from which I had a wide view, and where I found the sky was as far above my head as it was down on the banks of the Lyon. Out of the dim mists of childish recollection an event which took place when I was about three years of age flashes out in vivid light. At Moar farm house some miles further up the glen, died, at an advanced age, my grandmother's aunt. The farm house was on one side of the river and the highroad on the other. It was intended to take the coffin across the river to the highroad, and so to get to the Bridge of Balgie, which was then the only bridge on the thirty miles course of the Lyon, and was quite near to the church-yard. But this could not be done as the river was in flood and a great storm was still raging. So the funeral had to come by a rough and scarcely perceptible footpath, through one of the best marked self-sown remnants of the primitive Caledonian forest that still remain. My grand- mother and I were on a bench at the end of the house waiting for it — we were generally a league of two against the world — and when the funeral came in sight a flash of lightning seemed to dance on the wet mort-cloth and to envelope the whole procession. The thunder peal which followed caused the echoes of the many rocks and hills to reverberate like the firing-off of a succession of big gun batteries.
EARLY DAYS. 3
No doubt it was the lightning and thunder which permanently stamped the memory of this funeral on my mind.
As late as about 1780, a Glenlyon woman, Elgin Menzies, wife of Duncan Macnaughton, Cashlie, who died with her infant in childbed, Avas supposed to have been taken away by the fairies, and the story ran that she had been seen in dreams and heard to moan in hope of rescue from the three fairy mounds — Tom-a-churain, Tom-a-chorain, and Tom- na-glaice-moire, among which she was shifted about and kept imprisoned. But before my birth, religious teaching had banished the poor fairies from their mounds, although many stories concerning them and mountain hags, kelpies and brownies, were still told round firesides and smearing tubs. Witchcraft was not much spoken of, nor much thought of, although it had not been so outrightly denounced from the pulpit as the fairies. Belief in ghosts was very general, and deemed, from the religious point of view, as orthodox as belief in good and evil spirits, and their intervention in human affairs. Nature with manifold mystic influences keeps her hold on the rural population everywhere, but this hold is particularly strong in mountain lands, lonely isles, and countries which have wide deserts. Nature and God himself can be disregarded by urban masses of people ; but it is otherwise in rural districts. Even on the plains of East Anglia and the flats of Holland, people are influenced by forces and sensations which cannot be accounted for by visible and material causes. Whatever be the reason, Highlanders are deeply laid under this spell of nature influences and scenery environment. This fact is apparent enough in their poetry and traditional stories. It takes a
4 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
pathetic form in their undying love for the place where they were born, or where in former days their ancestors lived, which is cherished by emigrants in the colonies and foreign lands, and by their children and children's children for "Caledonia stern and wild." But it is just in the stern and wild countries in which man, through contact and combat with nature in her various moods, lets his imagination fly on wings of poetry and romance, and is inspired by a patriotism that does not take a worldly account of the material advantages enjoyed by the inhabi- tants of more fertile if more prosaic lauds.
To revert to this Highland belief in ghosts in the days of my youth, it is to be noted that although it was orthodox and very general, it was by no means universal. The sceptics were very numerous. 1 was one of them myself when I came to anything like years of discretion. The childish fear which made me resort for protection against danger when passing the churchyard alone after sunset, or in the night, was largely due to two things which deeply im- pressed me. The scare caused by the Burke and Hare case sent such an after-fear into the Highlands that, among others, our churchyard was watched for weeks after every funeral because of the body- snatchers. The key of the churchyard was always kept in our house, and the watcher, with loaded gun, used to come for it. So I heard many resur- rectionist stories which frightened me much worse than the usual run of ghost stories. The other frightening thing was the burial outside the church- yard of a poor woman of very good character, who, in middle-age melancholic madness, had hanged her- self to a beam behind the barred door of her cottage. The Glen people followed Niven, or Macniven, their
EARLY DAYS. 5
priest, who joined the Knoxian Reformation at its early stage, and took to himself a wife. Since 1688 they had been, with few exceptions, staunch Presby- terians, and when this poor woman committed suicide, they had ultra- Protestant religious views. Yet when startled by this most unusual event of a suicide, they agreed, in council hastily assembled, to fall back upon the traditional Roman Catholic practice of burial of suicides by night outside con- secrated ground. This was the chief but not the only thing in which they unconsciously retained remnants of the superseded faith. In speaking of dead people they generally added, " Math gu 'n robh aige." " Sith gu 'n d' fhuair anam," that is to say, they prayed that all should be well with the dead man, and that his soul should have peace.
When twelve or thirteen years of age, I passed, one wintry night, through an experience which much increased my want of belief in the general rank and file of ghost stories. On that night when I went to bed, my grandmother seemed to be in her usual state of health, which was a good one for a person of her advanced years. I was roused out of sleep some hours later by my father, who came to my bedside with a lighted candle in hand, to tell me that my grandmother had been seized with a bleeding of the nose, which the means commonly used in such cases failed to stop. He bade me rise at once to go for her married daughters, who lived a mile away. I had to pass the churchyard, and was full of death-apprehension. The moon was shining dimly through a hoar-frost haze. In passing the churchyard gate I had no thought of ghosts, but I shuddered at the idea that it was only too likely my grandmother would have to be buried in
6 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
kindred dust in that dreadfully cold weather. The cold added to my horror, although it could not be anything to the dead. I had not gone out of sight of the churchyard before I thought I was haunted by the ghosf ly head of an old woman which was not attached to any appearance of body. The horrid thing kept quite close to the right side of my face, always holding the same position whether I ran, turned, or stopped. The cold sweat of fear broke - out on me from head to foot. In sheer desperation I put up my hand, and lo ! I caught my ghost. The ribbon of my Glengarry bonnet had happened to get pinched forward behind my ear, and the indented end of it, covered by my breath, had frozen white, and seen close at hand from the tail of one eye, had assumed the appearance of this ghostly head of an old woman with a weird gap between a big nose and a prominent chin.
Many years after I had caught this ghost of mine, I gathered a large batch of stories of the supernatural then current in the Highlands of Perthshire, and found, when they were classified, that most of them were stories of wraiths and second sight, and the few which purported to concern returned spirits of the dead were not nearly so well vouched for as the others. There was one Balquidder story which did not seem to belong to either class. It made much local stir in its day, and the unexplainable manifestations were, I was told, witnessed in open daylight by many astonished observers, who gathered from various parts of the district to see articles of furniture thrown about without any visible agency, potatoes thrown out of a creel at the burnside without hands, rhyme, or reason, thatch from the roof tossed off' without a
-.EARLY DAYS. 7
breath of wind, and other singular performances which could only be ascribed to a tricksy Puck, full of mischievous fun spiced with a generous dose of malice. "Riochdan," or wraiths, which meant visible semblances of living persons where their bodies were not, had some similarity to Marconi's wireless telegraphy, but went a long step beyond it. The theory was that when a person strongly wished to be in another place he could throw a visible semblance of himself there. Concentration of a strong will under the impulse of an overmastering desire was required to effect the miracle of pro- jection. Such a wonder-working concentration of will was held to be uncanny, and unholy even when the impulse under which it took place was blameless or even genuinely good. So double-gangers were held in some suspicion. But the second-sight people saw the wraiths of people who had no wish what- ever to be elsewhere than where they were, and who had not the faintest sub-conscious idea that their semblances were stravaging.
This leads me to speak of Mairi Mhor, who had been for nearly all her life a fixture in our house, and who was the last of the Glenlyon second-sighters. A very sorrowful lad of eleven or twelve I was on the stormy wintry day on which Mairi's head was laid in the grave. The custom was that clansmen should have the first and last " togail," or lifting of the dead, and that the coffin should be brought " sunwise " up to the grave. At Mairi's funeral my father held the coffin's head-string as chief mourner and I held the foot one, while four of our clansmen had the first and last liftings. When the strings were thrown in on the coffin and the first spadefuls of mould fell on it, making a hollow sound, I should
8 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
have liked to have a good cry. But as I thought crying unmanly, I restrained, with an effort, the choking sensation in my throat. Hundreds of times had I made Mairi sing the milking song of " Crodh Chailein," " Macgregor from Roro," and other favourite pieces of Gaelic poetry, some of which survive in printed books, and some of which have undeservedly perished because not collected in due time. The musical gift, which Mairi most liberally possessed, was not bestowed upon me, but for all that I was ardently fond of Gaelic poetry and tales of ancient days. It was my great-grandfather who brought Mairi into our family. A niece of his who was married to a distant kinsman died, leaving four or five young children. The bereaved father of these children was then in much worse circumstances than he was later on when he went down to Callander and married, for his second wife, a Stewart lass from Glenbuckie. In a way common in the Highlands the kinsfolk came to the poor widower's aid and relieved him of some of his children. My great- grandfather took Mairi, then seven years old, to our house, and there she remained until she died more than fifty years afterwards. She had her first vision in the hill near a reputed fairy mound, and she always thought it was a vision of the fairies, although the shapes she saw were of grey-clothed men and not of green-robed beautiful little ladies. She was willing enough to be persuaded that she had on that occasion slept and dreamed, for she looked on second-sight as a frightful affliction which she was afraid of having inherited from her grand- father, Iain Dubh, the Laird of Culdare's caretaker of woods and castle-lands. My great-grandfather, who was this Dark John's elder brother, besides
EAKLY DAYS. 9
being a farmer, was the " Maor," or land-steward. So was his father, Finlay, before him, and so was my grandfather in succession to him, until long after the division of the barony. I do not know how long the maorship had passed from father to son, but I believe the passing was continuous for at least two centuries, although ownership had in that period twice changed. The Finlay above mentioned and his cousin, Finlay Macnaughton, were soldiers for a period of years during the reign of Queen Anne, and when in garrison at Fort- William, they became acquainted with twin sisters, Anne and Janet, daughters of Dark John Maciver, in the Braes of Lochaber, whom they afterwards married. Dark John Campbell was named after his Lochaber grand- father, and perhaps it was from that quarter his seership came to him. He was the only one of his father's family who had that troublesome gift. Dark John knew all the secrets of his cunning laird, James Menzies of Culdares, and guarded them with grim fidelity. Culdares was out in 1715, and he arid his Glenlyon followers were captured at Preston. His men were sent as seven years' bondsmen to Maryland, but by virtue of powerful influence and looks which were much more youthful than his years, he himself got off with a short exile on the Continent, whence he returned to the Highlands with larch plants in his valise — the first ever seen or planted in this country. As an estate improver, planter of trees, and promoter of good farming, high credit is due to James Menzies, who, after his son and heir grew up, came to be commonly called Old Culdares. He and his hench- man, Dark John, remained at home during the rebellion of 1745. But he sent a gift horse to Prince Charlie by John Macnaughton, who was
10 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
afterwards tried and executed at Carlisle for killing Colonel Gardiner, when he was lying wounded at Prestonpans. The report of the trial does not support the popular surmise that John Macnaughton could have saved his life by informing against the sender of the gift-horse. But no doubt Old Culdares had a bad time of it while the case was pending. He was too artful to commit any act of overt rebel- lion after his narrow escape thirty years before. But he was quite content that Cluny and his men should force out the men on his estate, as they had forced out Sir Robert Menzies' men down the water. The Glenlyon men refused to rise unless their laird put himself at their head. The laird declined to lead them, but he used underhand methods to get them to follow a youth of eighteen, Archibald, youngest son of John Campbell, styled of Glenlyon, who did not, at this time, possess a foot of land in Glenlyon, although he owned Fortingall. With this youth was joined an older man, Duncan Campbell, son of Duneaves, who then had the farm of Milton- Eonan on Culdares' estate. But it was to the youth and the old rebel, his father, that the men of the Glen looked as their " duchas," or natural hereditary leaders. Those among the men of the Glen who did not sympathise with the rebellion joined Lord Glenorchy's regiment on the other side.
Old Culdares anticipated the Disarming Act, on hearing of the Culloden defeat, by at once causing all the fire-arms of his men to be gathered and secretly buried in a place near Meggernie Castle, so that they might be available in case of another rising, for which, probably, he never ceased to hope till the day of his death in 1775. There is now plenty of evidence to prove that he was engaged in
EARLY DAYS. 11
Jacobite plottings after the death of the Old Pre- tender. Pending a Stuart Restoration he did not, however, fail to avail himself of interim chances. He managed to get his heir, Archibald, appointed Commissioner of Customs in Edinburgh, and to obtain for his younger son John a commission in the army of King George. While a perfect double- dealer in his relations with the established Govern- ment, he was, to his honour, as true as steel to the disinherited dynasty and all members of the Jacobite party. In the summer of 1746 it was pretty well known in Glenlyon by persons who were used as scouts to guard against surprise, that an important fugitive from Culloden was lurking about the dens and gullies of Gallin Burn, which has cut a deep ravine down the face of Gallin Hill, but it was only known to Dark John and his master who that important fugitive was, and they took precious care to keep their secret to themselves. Great care was needed, for King George's soldiers had stations at Weem, Fortingall, and the head of Loch Lyon, whence they were constantly patrolling up and down, and often visiting Meggernie Castle, where Old Culdares, as a matter of policy, received them with a show of loyal welcome and Highland hospi- tality. It was noted that he had arranged a system of signals by showing lights from turret windows, which would tell Dark John when it was safe for the fugitive to come down to sleep in his cottage, and when he should tell him to keep away. One night in haymaking time, matters must have been thought very critical, for Dark John went down to Inner- wick, and without further explanation than the vain allegation of his being afraid of ghosts, forced an ex-rebel to walk up with him to Gallin. But when
12 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
they got near Dark John's cottage what sounded like the cry of an unknown bird was heard, and the rebel, Iain Dubh Chuilfhodair, who lived to be nearly a hundred, and happened to be my mother's grandfather, was kept from entering the cottage, and curtly told to go home. The seer traded on his uncanny repute at this time to put his cottage under taboo, and used his caretaker's authority to the utmost for keeping prying eyes away from the hill lurking-place of the fugitive. But who could this important fugitive have been ? I can only hint at a probable answer by asking another question, Where did Lord George Murray conceal himself in the long interval between the disbanding of the Jacobite forces assembled at Ruthven and the visit to his wife at Tullibardine ?
Although Dark John could use the awe with which his uncanny gift inspired other people for protecting a fugitive from Culloden, and perhaps other purposes, he always lamented his possession of that gift. No wonder, when his unbidden visions were usually forecasts of the deaths of persons whose deaths were then to be least expected. Old Culdares, to whom John had been grimly faithful for upwards of forty years, died in 1775. To his son and successor, the Commissioner, John had been devotedly attached from that fine fellow's cradle days. When the Commissioner and his recently married wife came to Meggernie to take possession, John was jubilant, although somewhat weak and shaken by a late illness. When at his departing for Edinburgh, the Commissioner shook hands with him and said he hoped to find him in better health when he came back again, John shook from head to foot, and wailed out the words, "We will never meet
EARLY DAYS. 13
again." The Commissioner drove off, believing that John expected no recovery for himself. But no sooner was the carriage out of sight than John, amid sobs and tears, blurted out the explanation, " I may live for years, but his days are numbered. When he shook hands with me I saw the shroud drawn up to his very throat." He immediately repented of having spoken out, and as he could not recall his words, implored those who heard them to keep silent about what he had said till the bad news came, which in a short time was sure to come from Edinburgh. The silence was kept but badly, for all the people of the Glen were aware of what John had said before the news came of the death of the Commissioner, who shortly after his return to Edin- burgh was seized by a malignant fever, to which he quickly succumbed in the summer of his years and the fulness of his strength. Dark John survived his beloved master for some years, but was never his old self again. The prophecy of the Commis- sioner's death, of which the Commissioner himself had no knowledge or suspicion, was much talked about at gatherings of gentry in Edinburgh, as well as by people in Glerilyon and the neighbouring districts of the Highlands. The gift or affliction of second-sight did not descend to any of his three children. His son, the schoolmaster of Ardeonaig, lived, worked, and died as, in his sphere, a man of light, reading, and piety, on the south side of Loch Tay. His two daughters, who married in Glenlyon, were quite as normal as their neighbours, and so were their children, with the solitary exception of Mairi Mhor.
Mairi and her grandfather would probably have been remarkable mediums had they happened to
14 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
live in this age. Their visions came upon them like unwelcome surprises, but if they had willed them instead of willing against them, the case might have been different. Mairi Mhor had not, like Dark John, gruesome visions of shrouds on living persons. Her warnings of deaths came by seeing, in open day, wraiths of persons who were not to die. but to come for the churchyard key, or to officiate pro- minently at other people's funerals. She more than once mistook the appearances for the real persons, and under that idea revealed what she would other- wise try to suppress, because my father disliked as much to hear about her abnormal visitations as she disliked to endure them herself. Mairi was an industrious, humbly pious, thoroughly good woman, who recoiled with horror from her uncanny gift of seeing what was invisible to others. The strangest of all Main's glimpses of the future was her vision of the mill-stone, the announcement of which I heard, and the fulfilment of which I witnessed my- self. I remember very distinctly both the announce- ment and the fulfilment, but being then only seven or eight years old, I rely upon the report of my seniors for the fuller form of this story as accepted by the people of the Glen.
I think it must have been the time of peat- cutting, when, after an early breakfast, masters and servants went off to their work up the hill, taking with them bottles of milk and oatcakes for their midday meal, and ceming home before nightfall to a supper of broth, meat, and potatoes. Such a meal was in preparation when the smoke of the kitchen sent Mairi, who was asthmatic, to take refuge on the bench at the end of the house, where she stopped till the peat-cutters were sitting down to
EARLY DAYS. 15
their food, by evening daylight. Then Mairi rushed in with blazing eyes, and, under strong excitement, told her wonder tale before my father could suppress her. As Mairi's visions were generally forecasts of funerals, he was always anxious to suppress the revelation of them, not so much from the unbelief in them which he pretended to hold, as because of the effect they would have on his wife, servants, and children. On this occasion her vision was such a wonder to herself that she refused to be suppressed. She said she had seen a great gathering of the men of the neighbourhood, pulling by ropes tied to a pole which was stuck through a hole in its middle, a big round thing which they made to roll along over the burn and on past the hillock near the burn. Then my father took her in hand and accused her of falling asleep and dreaming. It was an argument he often used to silence her, and which she knew had some foundation of fact, since it was undeniable that when busy at work, carding or spinning wool, she occasionally dropped off into dream trances. But this time she was sure she was wide awake when the wonder thing passed, and she ended by saying to my father — " I saw you there among the rest." A short time passed, and as nothing hap- pened, the dream theory appeared to be justified. But lo ! one hot day the miller, in a huge hurry, and with his coat over his shoulder, came to tell the farmers who had much grain waiting to be ground for the next four months' provision, that the upper mill-stone had splintered that morning, and that the mill would, of course, have to stand idle until the broken stone was replaced by a new one. When Mairi heard of the accident, and listened to a talk about the methods to be used in bringing a new one
16 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
to the mill, she said at once, " That is what I saw." But at first it looked as if her vision would prove false to a large degree, for it was up the Glen that a rock was chosen out of which to carve the mill- stone. When some cutting out had been done, a flaw was discovered, and that place was abandoned. Down the Glen, on the Ben Lawers hills, the next cutting out took place, and a good mill-stone was the result, which, with a hole in its middle and roughly dressed, had then to be taken down from its high position and piloted and dragged up to the mill. Through the hole made in the middle of it for suiting its permanent mill work, a young larch tree, stripped and rounded, was driven and used as a rudder, lever, and holdfast for the ropes by which the men pulled it on and kept it back when a drag was required. They thus managed to take it down from a rough and high mountain, and by a con- venient ford to get it across the river to the high road which they intended to follow to Balgie Bridge, or a ford opposite Milton if the bridge did not give scope for the free working of their long pole. Had this intention been carried out, the procession would not have passed where Mairi had seen the wraith form. But at a narrow and dangerous turn of the road, within sight of Balgie Bridge, they found they could not get past. So they had to turn back to the ford below the manse, and having crossed there, they had no option but to follow the route of Mairi's vision, since the level fields were barred to them by the rising crops. The vision, therefore, was literally fulfilled without accident or mishap to men or mill-stone.
As already said, I met with comparatively few stories about the spirits of the dead returning to
EARLY DAYS. 17
trouble the living, in the Perthshire Highlands, and of those few scarcely any was so well vouched for as most of the wraith and second-sight stories. Although in Queen Anne's reign Meggernie Castle won the repute of being haunted, until a bold schoolmaster, with Bible and pistol, undertook to lay the troubled spirit with his mail-armour and clanking chains — and did it — the Glenlyon dead gave so little trouble to the living that there was no other story about them in my early days. But in those early days of mine, what was called " Spiorad na Comhsheilg," caused commotion in Breadalbane, and was much talked about in our Glen and in other neighbouring districts. The story was told before the Killin Kirk-Session, and the session clerk scrolled in writing the complaint of the Spiorad's family, and the tale in defence told by the man who said he saw the ghost and got from it a message to deliver to its family. I found afterwards that the complaint and the defence were not, although written down, entered in the Kirk-Session minute- book, and was told that the matter had been as far as possible hushed up later on, and that threatened proceedings in the civil court for slandering the dead had been given up because the Spiorad sent through the medium a further message to the family which convinced them, by certain revelation of secrets, that it was wiser to let proceedings drop and do what the Spiorad desired. As far as I can recollect, the following was the story, which I found many years afterwards still in semi-whispered circu- lation.
Donald Donn, a farmer in good circumstances and of honest reputation, was lying ill when the heir and widow of another farmer, with whom he had
2
18 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
cross-transactions in former years, claimed payment for a mare Donald had bought from the dead man, and which they, the dead man's representatives, said in the settling of accounts had not been paid for. Donald, on the other hand, declared that the animal had been paid for, and so did his wife in far more decisive words than he used. It seemed indeed at the last that he relied on his wife's certainty of conviction, and not on his own failing memory. As he was clearly drawing very near his end, the claimants said they would let the question be settled by his oath of verity. So a neighbouring Justice of the Peace was called in, and Donald swore in pre- sence of the claimants that the mare had been paid for. In taking the oath, he was so weak that his wife had to help him to hold up his hand. Within twenty-four hours Donald was dead, and, to use the phrase regarding people of blameless records, " was honourably buried before God and man." Time passed, and the dispute faded away from public memory, till the report spread that Donald's spirit had come back to redress the mistake he had made regarding the matter of the mare. A weaver, who had a house and a small croft in an upland glade of a wood near Donald's farm, when coming home through the wood from the Killin clachan one night was met by a dog, which, on being threatened with an iron-shod staff, changed into a foal, and then into the form of Donald Donn. In its final shape the spirit fought with the weaver, who found that, while he was grasping what seemed to be only an air- blown bladder, he received electric shocks — or, as he phrased it, shocks from " cuibhle nan goimheanan," or the electric wheel, which was then in repute for curing rheumatic pains and mitigating creeping
EARLY DAYS. 19
paralysis. The weaver, despairing of his life, at last cried out, " Donald, why are you so hard with me ?" " Why," said the spirit, letting the man go, " did you not speak to me before ?" Then they entered into pacific conversation, and the spirit explained that he was suffering much from the oath he had taken, when memory and mind were failing him, in regard to the claim about the mare, and that he wanted his family to settle this claim. To shew how much he suffered he opened his long cloak, and his bare body looked like a glass case filled with liquid flame. He gave the weaver some tokens to convince his family that the message sent to them was genuinely from himself. The tokens were in- sufficient. The wife and children of the dead man were not convinced, but so highly indignant that they hauled the weaver before the Session and threatened to bring him before the Sheriff or Court of Session. Before the Session the weaver told his story as he had told it to the family, and unflinch- ingly maintained that it was the truth and nothing but the truth. But for all his assertions he would have been in serious trouble if the spirit, at a second interview, had not furnished him with further credentials which silenced the dead man's family, and made them anxious to hush the matter up. The hushing up was so well done that the general public never learned whether or not the claim about the mare had been satisfied, but the belief of the country was that it had been quietly settled under a promise to say nothing about it. At the second interview the weaver asked the spirit if he could tell when he, the weaver, would die ? The spirit answered that he could only tell him that when he was at the funeral of a man who lived down the Lochside his
20 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
own funeral would be the next one to the clachan church-yard. The man designated was in good health and much younger than the weaver. The latter determined to take good care to keep away from this man's funeral if he chanced unexpectedly to die before him. Neither kinship nor close personal friendship would make his presence obligatory. But, as usually happened in such cases of forewarning, his " dan," or weird, was too strong for him. News in stormy, wintry weather did not then travel fast, and the weaver's croft and cottage were in a lonely nook off the road. Business one day made it neces- sary for him to go to the clachan. As he came to the junction of his side-glen road with the lochside main road, a funeral overtook him, which, as it was going the same way as himself, he could not help joining. On asking whose funeral it was, he found it was that of the very man whose death was to be the forecast of his own. He took the doom involved very philosophically ; went to the clachan, settled his business there, visited a married daughter and other friends there, calmly told them his story, solemnly bade them farewell, walked back home, took to bed and died within the week. So his funeral came next to that of the other man.
LtJCHD-SIUBHAIL. 21
CHAPTER II.
LUCHD-SIUBHAIL : OR GANGREL BODIES.
THE people who travelled about in these far off days were all newscarriers, who helped to keep widely-apart Highland districts in living touch with one another. They could be roughly divided into two classes — traders and beggars. But drivers of cattle to Falkirk trysts and harvesters formed another class, and so also did the drovers and cattle dealers. In our district John Macdonald from Badenoch, called the " Marsan Mor," or big merchant, was seventy years ago at the head of the traders. John travelled about with a cart of drapery goods from Inverness to Callander on the Lowland border. His twice a year visit was something like an event in every glen between the two places. He had been trained to the business, for his father, Alasdair Baideanach, had been long on the road before him. John might have prospered Jike others to the west of his district, who, starting in the same way, developed into Glasgow merchant princes, landowners, and the fathers of sons who took high positions in State and Church affairs. But John gave long credits, and finally failed to gather in the gear once within his reach. At a long distance behind this honest, and too jolly and careless " Marsan Mor," came the eident and also honest Irish packman, Peter Bryceland, from Glasgow, and the worthy northern packman, Iain Friseil. The pedlars who came carrying boxes containing reels,
22 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
cotton balls, scissors, needles, thimbles, watches, chains, and Birmingham jewellery were a less individually marked because a more variable class. Some of them came out as pedlars on commission for the benefit of their health, or from love of scenery and travelling, and they were sure of finding food and lodging without money and without price, except perhaps a trinket to a child or a thimble to the good- wife wherever they went.
I rather think our gipsies, although they had a sprinkling of Romany blood, and a knowledge of the Romany lingo, should properly be called tinkers, or travelling artisans. It seems to me that -the tinkers had been a feature in the life of the High- lands long before any " Lord of Little Egypt" with his followers came to Scotland and imposed on James V. and his Parliament, and that afterwards gipsies and tinkers got to some extent intermingled in the Highlands, but to an infinitely less degree than they did on the Borders. In my young days tinkers mended pots and pans, and made spoons out of the horns of rams and cattle. In the time of my grandfather, and even later, they still retained their old repute for being capable silversmiths to whom people brought silver and gold to be melted down and to be converted into brooches, rings, and clasps for girdles, or to decorate hilts of swords and dag- gers. The " Ceard Ross," whose grandson, Donald Ross, I knew in Balquhidder, was famous over a large district for the highly finished articles with old Celtic designs which he turned out, specimens of which were to be found in many households as long as the old social order lasted. The tinkers of my early days mended old ornaments but made few or no new ones. With the end of plaid, girdle, and
LUCSD-SIUBHAIL. 23
buckled-shoe fashion among the Highland men and women came the end of the demand for the neatly finished and artistically designed ornaments the tinkers had been making for untold generations, and when the demand ceased, the art was soon lost. In 1800 there were four corn mills in Glenlvon where
«/
there is none now. The sheep regime extinguished the little one in the Braes soon after that date, and when I was about ten, a spate from Ben Lawers destroyed the Roro one, which was not rebuilt, but St Eonan and Invervar mills were kept at work many years later on. Of the two, the oldest, named after St Adamnan or Eonan, and said to have been built by him in the seventh century, was the last to give up the ghost. It continued to grind on till 1880, or perhaps some years after that date. The successive disappearance of the mills shows how the sheep regime and large farms operated to restrict the arable cultivation of the former times. This digression about the corn mills is not so irrelevant as it looks. The grain was dried for grinding in kilns on the farmsteads, and these kilns provided better lodgings for tinkers than tents, which few of them carried about with them. The kiln which my father and the neighbouring farmer had in common was a fairly spacious and well-thatched building, in which thirty or forty old and young tinkers could lodge in what they called luxurious comfort. As it was situated near the middle of the Glen, and at the only bridge over the river, it suited them better than any other "ath" except that at Innerwick, which ranked second in their estimation. In child- hood I looked on the coming of the tinkers as a great and welcome event. They usually had a donkey or two with them, and I got liberty to ride
24 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
these animals. Peter Ruadh was a good piper, and set people dancing. I liked to sit on the steps leading down to the fire-place and watch them at their work, men roasting horns and shaping spoons out of them ; women scraping and polishing the moulded and sliced spoons, the better sort of which were not without embellishment ; other men making tin lanterns and cans, and old cunning hands mend- ing pots, pans, or rings and brooches. When trade abounded, they were quite industrious. But when money for work came in, they were apt to indulge in a spree and be noisy. Still the quarrelling within a band seldom went beyond words. The serious fighting took place when one band trespassed on the province of another. A ferocious fight took place on one occasion between our kiln band, who were old and usual visitors, and a band of new-comers in the Innerwick kiln, and I think we were all glad when the trespassers were well bruised and beaten off the ground. The tinkers could well have saved some of the money they earned at their trade if prudence had ruled their lives, for their living cost them nothing. They lived on the country where- ever they settled for a time. Their old women and young children were persuasive and scientific beggars. Their honesty was curiously crooked and depended on locality. Our kiln band would not touch a hen roost or steal anything within a pretty wide limit of their dwelling-place. But beyond that limit, say two miles on either side, let people be on the watch against small tinker foraging.
Here may be related an exception which goes to prove the rule of limited and crooked tinker honesty. Elijah was a lanky, delicate boy, who, both his parents being dead, became attached to our kiln's
LtfCHD-SIUBHAIL. 25
hereditary band, through his grandmother, a widow with her two sons in the army, who properly belonged to them. My grandmother had great pity for Elijah, who, besides being then physically a weakling, was supposed to be mentally wanting a penny or two in the shilling. Elijah was therefore invited to come up night after night to get a more substantial supper than he was likely to get in the kiln, where he was a sort of encumbrance, although not ill-treated, but, as my grandmother thought, was carelessly neglected. One winter night, when it was snowing hard, Elijah came and had his supper before the family sat down to table. Our farm servant, Peter, had given the horses and cows their fodder, and was passing the door with four bundles of straw for stirks which were in another place, when he was called in to supper just as Elijah had finished his and was rising to depart. Our "scalag" had left the straw at the door when he was called, and Elijah on going out found it there, thought it would be nicer than dry fern to sleep on, and forthwith lifted it and took it with him. The " scalag" did not hurry over his supper. On going out he was astonished to find the straw missing. It was clear enough who had been the thief, and he wished to go at once to re- claim it. My father said that by that time tinkers would be sleeping on it, and that it was not worth while to rouse the kiln at that hour of the night. My grandmother wanted the kiln to be raided at once, but other straw bundles were given to the stirks and the kiln was allowed to sleep in peace, much to her vexation. As she had specially patronised Elijah, she was burning with indignation at his treachery and ingratitude. Next day when an old crone from the kiln came to beg a drop of milk for her tea
26 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
she was angrily refused, with the biting explanation — " Gabh thusa sin airson braid Elijah " — " Take that for Elijah's theft ! " The crone protested, when she was told how Elijah had taken the straw, that she had gone to sleep early, and till that minute had known nothing about the theft, which was probably true. The crone's report of our old dame's rage about Elijah's little lapse from honesty must have caused commotion and discussion in the kiln, for without delay two younger women came as a deputation to say that Elijah had misled the kiln people by saying the straw had been given to him. The excuse only added to the flames. " And if the scamp said so, do you pretend to have believed his falsehood ?.,"," In a hard winter, when food for beasts threatens to be scarce, was it likely that, without your even asking it, freshly-threshed straw should be sent to you when you had already as much dried fern and rushes as should content you ? Be off with you, and never come here again begging for anything ! What you deserve is to^find on your next visit the door of the kiln barred and locked against you." " Gabhadh sibhse sin airson braid Elijah" — " Take you that for Elijah's theft." The men of the band then took the matter Jn hand. ^They_ came to her with abject apologies, pleading for "mathanas" (forgiveness), urging that she knew well that no such lapse from localised honesty had occurred for forty years before, and promising that nothing of the- kind would happen again. So peace was made at last, but " gabh thusa sin airson braid Elijah " became a proverbial phrase when a favour was refused to anyone who had given previous offence.
Elijah grew out of his early delicacy, and in time got a wife and family. He lived to a patriarchal
LUCHD-SIUBHAIL. 27
age, with a very good name and character. In the latter part of his life he was a sort of high priest among his people. He married the young ones who entered into wedlock with religious solemnity, for he had learned to read the Bible and had a strong turn for religion. The register might be the legal glue in these unions, but they were not thought complete without Elijah's religious seal and blessing. " The craftsman of the kiln "• —which is " ceard na h-atha," literally interpreted — was no respecter of the game laws, but, as he had no fire-arms, his poaching did not go beyond snaring hares and snaring or digging out rabbits. He was an expert angler both by day and night. He added the deft busking of hooks and making of horse-hair lines to his tinker industry. He fished sometimes for pearls in the Lyon, and to the indignation of our old bell- man, who looked on that fishing as his own monoply, seldom failed to get some. It was assumed that the kiln craftsman restricted himself to trout fishing, which was pretty free to all at the time of which I write, but I suspect that early in the season salmon fresh from the sea was consumed in the kiln when owners of streams and lochs could not get that luxury for love or money. Whatever they might do elsewhere, the tinker women did not dare to spae fortunes in our district, because they feared church denunciations. As herbalists they had a knowledge which was frequently useful to sick persons and beasts. Their eolasan or charms, spells and incantations, had, if spoken at all, to be muttered in dark corners and under promise of secrecy. They were old heathen things to which Christian labels had been incongruously attached many centuries before the Reformation.
28 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
The tinkers that travelled back and forward, plying their vocations, called themselves by High- land clan surnames — Maclarens, Macarthurs, Mac- alpines, Camerons, Toiseach or Mackintoshes, Rosses, Mackays, Gunns, etc. If they were, as I think they mostly were, the descendants of native travel- ling guilds of artisans who, late in their history, became very slightly mixed up with the outlandish Romany gipsies, their right to clan surnames may, in many instances, have been genuine although the clans were unwilling to admit it. At anyrate they went by the same surnames during successive generations. But those of them who called them- selves by the royal name were too numerous for credibility in their Stuart descent. Perhaps it was in consequence of James the Sixth's legislation against " broken men " that so many tinkers put themselves under the protection of the kingly surname. The tinkers took their clannish pretension seriously, and were hotly loyal to the surnames they had inherited or long ago assumed. My grand- mother, Catherine Macarthur — who flared up about poor Elijah's theft — had, because of her surname, and because she knew much about their past history, the controlling influence of a patroness over the band of Macarthurs that once or twice a year visited our kiln, as long as they stayed there. She spoke with respect, and so did others, of Duncan Mac- arthur, the former patriarch of the band who were nearly all his children and grandchildren and their marriage relations. Duncan, it seems, read his Bible, went to church in handsome clothes wherever he stayed, managed in some way to get a little education for his folk, and kept them under such strong moral discipline that they behaved well
LUCHD-SIUBHAIL. 29
during all his days. Duncan's influence survived his death, and sons and grandsons of his, I am informed, took to farming and boating in Argyllshire, where they levelled themselves up to honourable positions among the population of that county. About 1800, JohnMor Macarthur, my grandmother's brother, who was fifteen years younger than she was, took a turn at buying and selling cattle. At Dalnacardach Inn, then a great station, he and an Atholl man got into a fierce dispute with half-a- dozen men from the other side of the Grampians who were boasting about their own districts and pretending to run down the southern Highlands. The local patriotism which Tacitus describes as existing among the Caledonians, continued to be the source of many a quarrel over drink down to modern days. In the fight John and the Atholl man would eventually have got the worst of it, if tinker Duncan and his band, who happened to be crossing from north to south, had not unexpectedly appeared on the scene and threateningly intervened. When Duncan declared that he and his would not allow Robert Macarthur's son to be ill-used by any set of men in their presence, peace had to be made on the spot, for Duncan was master of the greater force, and although not a quarrelsome, he was a resolute man who would carry a warning to deeds. However welcome it might have been at the time, John did not at all like to be teased afterwards about the way in which he had been rescued by "his tinker clansmen." He had a high and noble traditional origin for the Macarthurs of Breadalbane and Glenlyon, and refused to entertain the idea that through that traditional origin they might also have some far-off tinker clansmen.
30 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
Dr John Stewart of Fyndynate was by no means so squeamish about admitting tinker claims for clan ranking according to their surnames. He had been a navy surgeon for many years, and when he came home to reside on his small ancestral property in Strath tay, and to establish for himself a medical practice over a large district, he was found still to be a Highlander of the Highlanders in language and sympathies. He was one of the small lairds of long descent who helped much to link all classes together and to sweeten the social life of their locality and their age. He gave the tinkers a camping-place on his property, where they took care to comport themselves so well that no fault could be justly found with them by Justices of the Peace — of which body he was himself a member — nor by ministers, kirk sessions, or the country people. When they encamped on his ground he looked to it that they should send their children to school well cleaned, and as decently clothed as circumstances allowed. The camping ground was open to bands of all surnames, but if two bands came at the same time they had to keep the peace among themselves, or woe to the offenders. The tinkers who used the royal surname of Stewart — and they were numerous —looked up to Fyndynate as their special or almost heaven-born chief, and those of other surnames were not much behind them in their devotion and obedience to him. When the country had no rural police, and kilns were numerous, and there was a large and steady demand for horn spoons and tin- smith's work, the tinkers had a tolerably good time of it, although their old silversmith work had come to an end with the eighteenth century in most places. As his part of the country was as orderly
LUCHD-SIUBHAIL. 31
and as law-abiding as could be wished, Fyndynate did not see the necessity for Sir Robert Peel's blue- coated police. He soon came into collision with the one who was stationed at Aberfeldy. He was driving in his dogcart one day to visit a patient whose house was some twenty miles up the country, and when he reached the Weem toll-bar he met the new policeman with a little tinker widow woman in tow. She was a daughter of old Duncan, and her proper name was Jean Macarthur, but she was known on both sides of the Grampians by the nickname of " Co-leaic," whatever that strange com- pound word might mean. Amazed at seeing the harmless Co-leaic interfered with, Fyndynate pulled up his horse, and in fiery wrath — for his just indignation at anything which looked to him like oppression of the weak flared up like kindled tow- shouted to the policeman, " Let that woman go. Why have you dared to stop her ? " "I have stopped her," replied the policeman, " because she is a vagrant." " She is," was the stern retort, " what she was born to be. She was at school with me. She has brave sons in the British army. I know her history, and will be her warrant that she has always been a decent, harmless body. Let her go at once if you do not want to get into trouble for being over-officious." Then turning to the Co-leaic, he asked her, " Where were you going when this man stopped you ? " She mentioned a farm some miles further up the water. " I'll be driving past it," said he, " so get up on the back seat and I'll take you there." In this manner demure little Jean was carried off triumphantly, and the over- zealous policeman was left discomfited.
32 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
Politically a Tory of the Tories, our worthy doctor was practically a democratic feudalist with a sympathetic heart, unpaid services, an open hand, a voice loud in denunciation of oppression, and persuasive in pleading for the poor and afflicted. To take the tinker class as the lowest, I verily believe he did more good among them by blending kindness with scoldings and quarter-deck discipline than any of the agencies for redeeming them which have been since then set on foot. And they repaid him with reverential devotion and worshipful loyalty. I had in later years, when schoolmaster and registrar at Fortingall, a singularly touching proof of the feelings his tinker people entertained towards him. On a winter day, when the roads were slushy after a heavy fall of snow, and showers were still falling, a young sprightly tinker girl of twenty or there- abouts, who, if well washed and dressed, would have been called a pretty girl anywhere, came to ray house. She had a newly-born, well-wrapt babe clasped to her bosom, and her errand was to get it registered. She sat by the kitchen fire crooning in the pride of young motherhood to the pink morsel of humanity while I went for the register, and my sister made tea for her. When questioned as to the date of birth and other usual particulars, the story, in all respects a true one, which she had to tell was an amazing one. The child was not yet forty-eight hours old, and yet she had, through the slushy roads and snow showers, walked with it that day four long Scotch miles to get it registered. She made quite light of that feat of hardihood, but shuddered a little when telling what preceded the child's birth. She and her young husband were with the band to which they belonged in Bunrannoch when she began
LUCHD-SItTBHAIL. 33
to think that it was nearly her time, and insisted on going away with her man at once, that their child might be born on Fyndynate's Land, where she had been born herself. " When more than half way over the hill the snowstorm," she said, " burst suddenly upon us, and after struggling for a while with the storm, I became weary-worn, and my trouble began. Happily the hill barn above the Garth farmhouses was near, and my lad, the dear fellow, carried me and laid me therein. He ran himself panting — ' le anail na uchd ' — to the farm- houses for help. And good women, with blankets and lights, for it was now mirk night, came to me, and could not have been kinder if they had been angels from heaven. My bairn was born in the barn, but they soon carried us both to a comfortable bed and warm fireside. It is a pity that the bairn was not born at Fyndynate, but it is a mercy he is a boy, and that he is to be baptised John Stewart." " But," I hinted, " your husband does not call him- self a Stewart ?" " Well," she replied, " I am a Stewart, and my first-born is to be baptised John Stewart." When the entry was completed, she was getting to her second cup of tea, and I asked her if she would like an ember in it. " Oh," she said, " I want to be a strictly sober woman all my life, but to-day a drop of spirits would go down — deas-taobh mo chleibh — the right side of my heart." So the second cup was laced with whisky, and having merrily thanked us and drunk it up, she went on her way rejoicing. I hope John Stewart grew up to be a hardy soldier ; but I never afterwards came across him or his parents, probably because when I went to Balquidder I was outside their travelling ground.
3
34 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
CHAPTER III.
BIG DUNCAN THE FOOL.
BIG DUNCAN the Fool was called "Garth's Fool" in Edinburgh, and in the Highland glens and straths and Isles beyond his own district, " Big Duncan the Piper." His home district was the land between Logierait and Drumalbane, watered by the Tay and its tributaries the Dochart, the Lochay, the Lyon, the Tummel, and the Garry. Duncan and his sister were twins and both of them were born naturals. Their misfortune could not be attributed to any hereditary cause. Their father and mother were not even distantly related, and were healthy people. The two sons born to them after the unfortunate twins were two as bright lads as could be found anywhere. The father of this family of four was a tailor and crofter who prospered by his industry in a humbly comfortable and most respectable way, until he was struck down by fever and died, when the youngest was still a babe on the knee. His young widow was left heavily handicapped by the twins, and with little means beyond her own spinning industry and general resourcefulness. She had her reward for bearing with courage and hope a burden under which many in her position would have helplessly sunk, for she lived long after she saw the elder of her two younger sons a well-placed and deservedly popular minister of the Church of Scot- land, and the other a worthy parish schoolmaster. The boys were clever, ambitious, and persevering. The parish school of Fortingall was taught, when
BIG DUNCAN THE FOOL. 35
they entered it, by crippled Neil Macintyre, who, if peppery and a strict disciplinarian, was quick to discern merit, and to give instruction out of school hours to pupils who wanted to go to the University, and shared his own enthusiasm for classical learning. "When Neil died his successor found the widow's two clever boys at the top, or nearly at the top of the school. This successor was Archibald Menzies, a probationer of the Church of Scotland, who some years later, by the influence of his Chief of Weem, was appointed to the parish of Dull. The widow- mother of the boys was a Menzies also, and that fact made, I suspect, a clannish connection which helped them on. They certainly could and did make a good fight on their own hand, but when the parish school of Dull became vacant, there can be no doubt the minister of Dull and the Chief of the Menzies clan helped to appoint Robert, the elder of the brothers, schoolmaster of that parish. As Robert wanted to make the school a stepping-stone to the Church, and his junior, Alexander, nourished a similar ambition, the notable expedient was hit upon of making them colleague schoolmasters, so that they could in alternate sessions be at St Andrews University. Robert compassed his ambition, but Alexander, after a session or two at college, married and settled down as schoolmaster of Dull, which position he most honourably held for nearly half a century. Both these Macgregor brothers were good Gaelic poets and very ardent patriots.
" When Napoleon's banners at Boulogne Armed in our islands every freeman,"
they jointly composed a warlike appeal to the High- land clans, which had no small rousing and recruiting effect throughout the Highlands. It begins :—
36 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
Eiribh suas anns an am so,
Gach ceannard tha fo'n chrun ;
Cumaibh thall na Frangaich,
Na leigibh 'm feasd a nail iad ;
Ged robh sibh arm an teanndachd,
Na tionndaibh 'ur cul
Gus an coisinn sibh Ian bhuaidh,
'S am faigh sibh duals is cliu.
Glcidhibh taobh na fairge,
Is earbaibh ris na suil ;
Bibh trie gu clis gar dearbhadh fein,
Nach tig iad ann an anamoch oirbh
Gus an ruig na sealgairean
O gharbh-bhcannan nan stuc ;
'S iad na Cinnich as gach ionad
A philleas iad gu dluth.
After that rattling general call on Highland patriotism, each clan is separately invoked to come forth in force for the national defence.
When children, Duncan and his sister were both obedient to their mother. Duncan always remained so, but Margaret when she grew up was a handful to the poor widow. She took violent fits of lunatic disobedience, and on more than one occasion assaulted her mother, who had to be rescued by the villagers. The rescuers had no compunction about binding Margaret in tethers until she recovered what portion of sense she possessed. Duncan, who adored his mother, and was never violent to any- body, strongly, if silently, resented Margaret's assaults on their mother. When Margaret died and was buried, he went to the churchyard to see where they had put her, for he never went to any funeral and always kept away from wakes, and when the bell-man showed him his sister's grave he danced on it with joy, and shouted exultingly, " Feuch an gabh thu air do mhathair a nise !" (" See if you can now beat your mother!").
BIG DUNCAN THE FOOL. 37
In childhood, Duncan and Margaret peram- bulated Fortingall together. As long as Dr David Campbell of Glenlyon, on whose land they were born and their mother had her cottage, was alive they were constant visitors to the Glenlyon House kitchen, with excursions also to that of Kobert Stewart of Garth. When the last Campbell Laird of Glenlyon died, and his property passed to his grand-nephew, Francis Gardyn Campbell of Troup, who was a non-resident, the Garth House kitchen became their objective. The Laird of Garth had a lawyer relative, another Robert Stewart, in Edin- burgh, whom his children, and the whole local popu- lation in imitation of them, called " Robbie Uncle." One evening the twins came rushing through the field to the house with the announcement that Robbie Uncle was coming in a coach, and that they had cut through the field to bring the news before he could get round and go up the drive. They were believed, although the visit was not expected. Robbie Uncle and his coach, however, were never seen by anybody else. The twins were truthful, but this story of theirs was thought to be a con- coction or strange joint hallucination, until soon news came from Edinburgh that Robbie Uncle had died there on the very day on which the twins said they saw him and his coach.
Duncan's early and lasting desire was to be ranked among pipers. It was said that he could detect the mistakes and shortcomings of trained fiddlers and pipers. If so, he must have had a good ear for music, although he could never play anything through himself. He played bits of laments and marches and reels all mixed up in comical disorder and disharmony. But he admired his own perfor-
38 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
mances, and this made him proud and happy, especially when at weddings he could, apart from the general company, get a lot of children on a green mound to dance and shout about him in an ecstacy of mad fun and frolic. In his early teens he somehow managed to get old pipes. He then began to widen the circuit of his roamings, and to expect a piper's welcome and even fees. From a gentleman he expected a silver coin, but from a common person a copper farthing, halfpenny, or penny, would quite content him if the coin given him had a king's head on it, his motto being, " Is bonn nach fhiach bonn gun dealbh," (" A coin without an image is a worth- less coin "). He never consorted with tinkers, meal- poke beggars, or any other gangrel bodies, for in his own estimation was he not a strolling piper and gentleman ? He never paid for anything, and never spent a penny in purchases or gifts. But as long as his mother lived he allowed her, under whining protests to turn out his pockets and take his money. He had the gathering and hiding instincts of a raven or a magpie, and after his mother's death took to the habit of concealing his coins in holes in trees and walls, and never took them out again. Several of his hoards have since been discovered, and more of them yet may be found, for although small in value they were numerous.
When George IV. visited Scotland, Duncan went to Edinburgh to see him, and on coming home reported that the King was a " duine reamhar tlachmhor " (a fat handsome man). He was in the habit of going annually to the Caledonian meeting in Edinburgh, and on the road and in the Capital was treated generously as " Garth's Fool," while in his own opinion he was Garth's piper. At Queens-
BIG DUNCAN THE POOL. 39
ferry a change of ferryman had taken place. A Pharaoh had arisen there who knew not our innocent Joseph. The old ferryman passed Duncan back and forward without ever asking him to pay for the passage. The new ferryman turned him off the boat because he would not pay, although probably he could easily have done so had not paying for anything been totally contrary to his fixed principle. On being turned off, Duncan went down to the beach beside the boat, and having looked at the sea, shouted out in a defiant tone, " Ged tha e leathann cha'n eil e domhain ; togaidh mi m' fheile, 's theid mi troimhe ! " (" Though it is broad it is not deep ; I'll lift my kilt and go through it !"). There were Highlanders on board who put his words into English, while Duncan was making visible prepara- tions for carrying out his declared intentions. Several offered to pay Duncan's fare, but when matters were explained to the new ferryman, he took Duncan on board, and made him the free passenger he had been in the time of his predecessor.
After having officiated a time at Braemar, Duncan's minister brother was appointed to the parish of Kilmuir, in Skye. Duncan used to visit the minister when he was at Braemar, but Skye lay outside the circuit of his roamings and the bounds of his topographical and social knowledge. The people there, with the exception of the minister and his wife, would be all strangers to him, and he would be a stranger to them. So he let some years elapse before he set his face towards Skye. But one midwinter, such a longing to see his brother came over him, that he went forth with his pipes on that pilgrimage without telling anyone at home. He must have had some share of the instinct of the
40 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
birds of passage, for he managed to make his way to Portree through districts hitherto unknown to him, and to obtain free ferry passage. Between Portree and Kilmuir, he was overtaken by a wild snow and wind storm. Stranger as he was, he always kept his face the right way, although he finally strayed a little from the proper road. He did not know it, but he was pretty near the manse when his half- frozen legs failed him, and he sat down to die. He had some breath left yet, and he used it to blow the pipes for his own coronach. His brother heard the skirling between the gusts of wind, and said at once : " That is Duncan if he is alive, and if he is not it is his ghost. I feel he is in extreme peril. Let us go and search for him." They marched rapidly in the direction of the sound, but as that was soon hushed, they lost some time in rinding the place where poor Duncan had laid himself down to die. When discovered he was speechless and help- less. They carried him to the manse, where on being thawed and regaining power of utterance, he said, as if in apology for his unwonted break- down : — " Mar bhitheadh a ghaoth cha d' thoirinn baol air a chathamh " (" Were it not for the wind I would not care the skin of a bean for the drifting.") General David Stewart, the historian of the Highland regiments, who, on the deaths of his father and his elder brother, succeeded to the Garth estate, was Duncan's hero of heroes and earthly providence and deity. Duncan often carried messages and letters between lairds' houses, and always carried out his instructions with the greatest promptitude and fidelity. General Stewart, in conversation with Sir Neil Menzies, declared his belief that it was impossible by any temptations to make Duncan
BIG DUNCAN THE POOL. 41
break a promise or cause him to deviate from the literal performance of his instnictioris. Sir Neil said, " Let us put him to a hard test. Send him down to me next week with a note and an empty basket, tied and sealed. Tell him that I will send something else back in the basket, and make him promise that he will deliver it to you as I gave it to him without opening it by the way." The proposed test was carried out. Duncan gave his promise to the General, and delivered note and basket to Sir Neil, who sent him to the Castle kitchen to be well fed there, while he put the mysterious something in the basket, and tied and sealed it very carefully. He solemnly gave Duncan a note to the General and the sealed basket, and made him promise again that nothing should tempt him to open the basket by the way. The day was hot and Duncan was well fed, and very likely had been on one of his restless roamings the previous night. So when he reached Callwood he went over the wall to have a nice sleep in the shade of the bushes among the ferns, keeping a hand still on the basket. But his repose was in a short time disturbed by movements and noises in the basket. Between sleep and wakefulness curiosity made Duncan forget his double promise. He opened the basket, and out jumped a hare, which in a moment got out of his sight among the bushes. At Garth House he delivered an open basket and the accompanying letter to the General. The latter, having looked at the empty basket, read the note and said, " Duncan, in this letter there is a hare — ." He was not allowed to finish his sentence by the word " mentioned," for Duncan, cutting a caper, cried in huge delight, " Dilliman ! Dilliman ! she has got iuto the letter though she jumped out and ran away when I opened the basket in Callwood ! "
42 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
At the General Election which followed the passing of the Reform Bill, the Whigs of Perthshire brought out Lord Ormelie, the son and heir of the very popular first Marquis of Breadalbane, to oppose the farmer Tory member, and they had a meeting to promote his candidature at Fortingall, which all the local Whig gentlemen attended. Among these was Boreland, who not long before had been tried for manslaughter. In a dark night Boreland fired with small shot at a man who had broken into his house, and when challenged and threatened, neither stopped nor spoke. Some of the pellets intended for his legs hit him in vital parts ; and although he was not killed on the spot, he subsequently died of the injuries. Duncan of course was present at the gathering, and, in the pauses of the oratory, inter- jected some skirls of his pipes. At the close he went round, hat in hand, for his piper's fee, and made a great haul of sixpences and shillings. Bore- land, having no smaller coin, threw a half-crown into the hat. Amazed at getting such a big silver coin, Duncan inspected it on both sides, and on finding that its "dealbhan" or "images" were all that could be desired, looked up at Boreland and said in a loud voice, " Dhia ! 's math nach do chroch iad sibh" (" O God! it's well they did not hang
you !")
Duncan's ideas of what should be his full dress as a piper were peculiar. In one thing he never varied. He always wore on his head no Highland bonnet but an old chimney-pot hat. He got their discarded ones from gentlemen and ministers. His jackets were well bedizzened with buttons. He wore a girdle and shabby sporran. His kilt was less like a kilt than a woman's short petticoat.
BIG DUNCAN THE FOOL. 43
Brogues and either hose or stockings, as necessity decreed, completed his attire. Very often he was restless at night, and would sleep outside in the daytime. It was lucky for himself and others that he was strictly honest, for had he not been so he might have been very troublesome, since when the night-roaming fit was on him it was his habit to go to bed in one place at the usual hour, and ere morning to be found scaring sleepers at another house miles away, and reassuring the scared ones by saying it was only himself, " 'S mi fhein a th' aim." These house-breaking night surprises were, it is said, made easier for him by the fact that dogs took him for a friend and would not bark at him. He seems to have had a brotherhood relation- ship and mysterious influence over most animals. Although it is well vouched for, the following story about that mysterious influence of his is hardly credible. But it gained local belief in the district of which it was the scene, and even was pictorially represented. Here it is as far as I can recollect it:-
The Laird of Duntanlich had a fine young bull, for which he got summer-grazing in the Duke of Atholl's deer forest. The animal became rampagious in the forest, attacked dogs and men, and nearly killed a forester. Word was sent to the Laird that the bull would be shot if he did not instantly take him away. Taking him away alive and safe was too risky a task to be readily undertaken by ordinary men. Knowing of Duncan's reputation for having a mysterious influence over animals, the Laird sent for him, told him his difficulty, and asked him if he would go for the wild beast. Duncan said he would on these conditions, that a horse and some lengths
44 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
of cord should be given to him, and that he should be let into the forest to spend a night there, and that the foresters should not interfere with him. Having before night-fall been let into the forest, and the place where the bull was to be found having been pointed out to him, the foresters left him to his own devices. Next morning, when people were rising and lighting their fires, they saw Duncan, with tall hat and pipes, riding down the highway on the back of a quietly marching bull, with the horse, its halter tied to the bull's tail, placidly fol- lowing. Whether or not the tale received orna- mental touches of fiction in the popular version of it, there is, I believe, no doubt as to the fact that Duncan safely brought home a dangerous animal, which was ever afterwards as tame as any of its kind.
Had Duncan, like persons of his sort in the present day, been shut up in a workhouse or an asylum, he would soon have died of a broken heart, and the places of his perambulations would have been deprived of a long, lasting source of amuse- ment. He had such a horror of death that it kept him away from wakes and funerals. He loved wedding festivities, and, invited or uninvited, con- trived to be present at most of those which took place within two or three parishes. He lived and roamed about till between seventy and eighty years of age. His legs at last suddenly failed him, and he was taken to his brother the schoolmaster's house, where some months later he died. The parish minister used to visit him and speak to him about the present life and the after-death life. Duncan did not much care about either life. The word " aiseirigh," the " re-arising," which is the Gaelic for resurrection,
TEMPORA MUTANTUR. 45
aroused his keen attention. "Do we all rise again ?" he eagerly asked. " The Bible, which is the word of God, says so," replied the minister. Duncan raised his head, clapped his hands, and cried out, " Dilliman ! Dilliman ! I'll see my General again ! " — meaning General Stewart of Garth, who died at St. Lucia, of which he was Governor, many years before. To poor Duncan, seeing his General meant heavenly bliss and the fulfilment of his highest desire.
CHAPTER IV.
TEMPORA MUTANTUR.
IF, during the twenty years between 1828 and 1848, with which I am now discursively dealing as memories serve and thoughts arise in my mind, a stranger like Dr Johnson in 1772, and Leyden the border poet in 1800, passed through the glens, hills, and straths from Stirling to Caithness, he would naturally conclude that except in orderliness and means of education, the Highlands still remained essentially unaltered. And that conclusion would not be without justifying facts. Within the old Highland Lines Gaelic was still the language of the people, and the people themselves, as their sur- names, and the traditions, customs, and superstitions which had come down to them on the wings of untold centuries plainly indicated, were, taken as a whole, of genuine Celtic descent. But the old and the new were already beginning to hustle and jostle one another, and the observer who looked below the surface could see that a great change was in progress, although he might not foresee the revol-
46 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
utionising effect of the railways which were to open the Highlands up in after years. Before the High- lands were penetrated by railways, the changing forces at work were economic, educational, and religious. From the unrecorded days of antiquity, Highland farming proceeded unintermittingly on simple lines — the cultivation of every bit of soil on which crops could be raised, and the keeping of large stocks of cattle, horses, goats, and small flocks of little sheep, which produced sweet mutton and fine wool. Cows, goats, and sheep were all milked, for next to stock increase, crops, and on the sea- coast fishing, dairy industry took its place in -the family reckoning, although domestic spinning, dye- ing, and weaving, besides providing clothing and linen, also supplied the money needed for purchasing what could not be made at home, and much more. Under the ancestral farming dispensation, Highland tenants had in township companies two holdings— namely, winter towns and shealings or summer grazings. The shealings might be adjacent to the winter-towns, or ten or twenty miles away. But whether near at hand or far off, the young and yeld animals were sent to them in the spring, and women, children, and the main stock migrated to them early in May, and remained there till fairly on in the autumn. I saw the last of the shealing life and shared in its romance, and also in its weirdness, when we herd-boys slept in the lonely huts before the spinning milkmaids came up with the cows and the dairy utensils. The ruined mills on many streams dumbly testify, and the records, in which rents in kind are enumerated, bear written evidence to the fact that under the old husbandry the scanty arable lands of the Highlands
TEMPOBA MUTANTUE. 47
produced heavier crops than they produce at the present time. The old farmers had plenty of farm- yard manure, and, speaking in particular for my native district, the tenants used far back a good system of rotation, burned much lime, and so planned that every field that would be the better of the lime application got a dose of it every eight or ten years. Farming implements were simple and rude compared to what they are now, most of them being made at home, but in result cultivation was much better than it is now, and much more land was under crops.
Although Jacobites might still hope and plot for the restoration of the Stuart dynasty, within twenty-five years after Culloden the Highlands, by garrisons, military roads, and, immediately after the battle, by Cumberland atrocities, were brought into the firm grip of law and order. "Creachs" and clan feuds were put an end to for ever more. No room was left for even another Bob Hoy. The Church of Scotland, which had all along stood firmly for the Revolution Settlement, and had in many a district of Gaeldom to encounter the hostility of Jacobite chiefs and potentates, was now able to assert a dominating position in regard to matters of faith, morals, and education. Clannishness retained much of its pristine vigour, and still survives as a senti- ment of kinship and brotherhood from far off times. The feudal power of nobles and landowners had, however, its tap-root cut by the abolition of herit- able jurisdiction. Therefore proprietors turned their attentions to the management and improvement of their estates. It was not till well on in the next century that they realised the letting value of their fishing and shooting rights, which they were far
48 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
from enforcing strictly as long as they kept them in their own hands. But they were easily persuaded by Lowland advisers that they could get higher farm rents by abolishing the shealings, as far as they were separable from winter-towns, and by stocking them with blackfaced sheep from the Borders, which were much bigger and hardier then, whatever they may be now, than the small native breed, which in hard winters had to be housed and hand-fed. Economically, or from the higher rent point of view, the advice was good, and it held good for the subsequent hundred years, until colonial and foreign wools reduced the value of the home product, and the cost of wintering the home sheep had run up to almost the equivalent of a second rent. Pacification of the Highlands next turned the attention of the Lowlanders to the chances opened to the Lowland sheep-farmers and shepherds, who, acting as proprietors' grieves and instructors of native tenants in Border sheep-farming, gathered gear and courage to take shealing farms themselves. The Lowland invasion of estate-managers, grieves, shepherds, and blackfaced sheep began in 1770. On the part of most proprietors who were continuously resident on their land, excepting for winter visits to Edinburgh, and who had kindly sympathies and relations with their people, the social revolution involved in the abandonment of the old system was fully realised and dreaded. Noblemen who, like the Earl of Breadalbane, had wide stretches of old deer forest lands, turned them into sheep-farms, and on them the blackfaced sheep from the Borders, under the care of Lowland managers and shepherds, were placed and found to be profitable. But tenants' shealings were in most cases left undisturbed for
TEMPORA MUTANTUK. 49
the next thirty years. Old Culdares, who was an agriculturalist beyond his age, put blackfaced sheep on his home farm of Gallin and its far away Ben- vannoch shealing, but did not disturb the tenants' double-holdings. In bringing into the Glen Walter Grieve from Huntly, Selkirkshire, and Walter Scott from Wester Buccleuch, Roxburghshire, his avowed object was the teaching of native tenants how to manage club-stocks of southern sheep for them- selves. That object was fully attained, although he did not live to see it. In 1779 a temporary back- set was given to the new sheep regime by the price of wool falling from 5s to 2s 2d per stone ; but the blackfaced once introduced very soon superseded the small native breed. The native farmers formed club-stocks of them, while their other animals, like the arable land, remained as before in individual ownership. Old Culdares was pressed by debt. His chief adviser, Mr Anderson, afterwards minister of Old Deer, proposed to divide the barony into a few large separate farms, but however pressed for money and tempted by what Mr Anderson assured him was a certainty of gain, Culdares was too much of a Highlander to adopt a plan so radically revolutionary and so harsh to his native tenants. The Lowlanders who came with the blackfaced, and later on with the Cheviots, remained in most cases in the Highlands and drew others after them ; but the conquering Lowland invasion only began with the railway era.
50 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
CHAPTER V.
EDUCATION AND THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.
IN the eighteenth century the Highlands became fully equipped with parish schools, and well sprinkled with side-schools of more kinds than one, but all of which were under the superintendence of the Church of Scotland. As a rule Whig and Pres- byterian landlords co-operated with the Church, but it is to the ceaseless efforts and constant pressure of the Church that the remarkable spread of education in the Highlands between the Revolution and 1800 must be attributed. Jacobite landowners as a class, with many exceptions, looked upon the schools as weapons put into the hands of enemies (already too formidable) both to the Stuart dynasty and the feudal power of landlords. Yet before the third part of the eighteenth century had passed into history, a strong conservative element had tempered the doctrinal and disciplinary intolerance inherited from the Covenanters. The Erskine Secessionists and other subsequent bands of sectaries testified loudly against the unfaithfulness of the Moderate rulers of the Church of Scotland, who preached, they complained, cold morality sermons, did not excom- municate obstinate offenders, and did not ask the civil powers to burn witches and execute atheists. From the specimens of the decried sermons which have come down, I think the allegation that they were sound, and often excellently composed moral essays rather than purely doctrinal discourses must
EDUCATION AND THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 51
be accepted. But the question arises, were the ministers within the Highland line as moderate and cauldrife in matters of doctrine as the Lowland rulers of their Church ? That question as regards many of them must be answered in the negative. In the Highland parishes watered by the Tay and its affluents, the parish ministers of the eighteenth century, from George the First's reign till the beginning of the next century, when a few slack ones appeared among them, were evangelical in their preaching, stern reprovers of the vicious, excellent guardians of the poor, and vigorous pro- moters of popular education. Mr Archibald Camp- bell, minister of Weem, who died in 1740, mortified six thousand merks, at that time a large sum, which could not have been saved from his small stipend, for endowing side-schools in three outlying parts of his extraordinarily divided parish. Mr Duncan Macara, for half a century, from 1753 downwards, minister of Fortingall, saw to it that Glenlyon and Rannoch had side-schools, in which reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the Bible and Shorter Catechism were efficiently taught. Mr James Stewart, min- ister of Killin, who first translated the New Testament into Highland Gaelic — the Irish version having been used before — was a zealous evangelical preacher. A similar tale had to be told of the large majority of the Highland ministers of the eighteenth century, both north and south of the Grampians. The hymns of Dugald Buchanan, who was Mr Macara's missionary-schoolmaster at Kinloch-Rannoch, may, I think, be taken to represent fairly the kind of theology then prevalent in the Highlands. High- land theology was in strong contrast to that of the cold morality discourses which evaded the enforce-
52 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
ment of positive doctrines, and seemed to verge on philosophical deism. That fact explains how readily the religious revival which took place in the south in the early years of the nineteenth century received a hearty response in the Highlands, and how hotly afterwards the Highlanders went into the anti- Patronage movement.
CHAPTER VI.
SCOTI VAGI.
HIGHLANDERS followed with hearty goodwill the leadership of ministers and elders in educational matters. They were passionately attached to their own language, and thought that the Highlands, without Gaelic to wake the echoes of its rocks and fairy -haunted corries, would lose all romance and charm, although scenery, grouse, deer, and fishing waters still remained. But they always desired to be bi-lingual, so that they might through their surplus youth invade the Lowlands and the wide world. They had always in peace and war been carrying on that invasion, and they little dreamed a time would come when the Lowlands and England and Ireland and foreign countries would invade their mountain lands, or when Gaelic would either be extinguished or verge upon extinction before their descendants understood that with its disap- pearance Gaeldom would be deprived of a soul- element and make a belated rally to try to arrest that peril. Before they had many schools at home, they used to send their children to serve as herds in the Lowlands in order that they might Jearn the
SCOTI VAGI. 53
"Beurla," and it was the custom for large numbers of their grown men and women to go to the Low- lands yearly to earn wages as harvesters, and at the same time to enlarge their knowledge of the sort of English spoken there. When they got schools of their own where pure book English was taught, there was no further cause for going to the Lowlands to learn "Beurla." Englishmen, who as sportsmen, or visitors on other accounts, came to the Highlands from the date of Dr Johnson's journey downwards, found Highlanders who spoke English at all, speak- ing pure book English with some of the mountain tongue's accents clinging to it in a way frequently pleasing to their ears, while they found the "Beurla" of the neighbouring Lowlands in some districts horribly harsh and hardly intelligible to them. But from time immemorial there had been a permanent necessity for the surplus population, bred and brought up in the Highlands and Isles, to seek outlets and means of existence in the Lowlands or the wide, wide world. " Scoti Vagi" the ancestors of the Highlanders had been of old, and "Wandering Scots" the surplus population of Highlands and Isles had to be for all ages while the old conditions lasted ; and while the abler wanderers sought scope for ambition, and the less aspiring better means of subsistence, in the Lowlands and in far countries, the old love of adventure and self-reliance inspired the race as a whole. Swarms of Highlanders went to the last Crusade under the two Celtic Earls — Atholl and Galloway. In succeeding ages swarms of them served and fought in France and Germany. As soon as King James ascended the throne of Queen Elizabeth, adventurous Highlanders found their way to India and the Colonies — or plantations
54 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
as they were then called. And wherever High- landers went they drew more of their race after them. Banishment of Highlanders who were rebellious or unruly at home strengthened the British possessions abroad. The Highlanders cap- tured at Preston were sent to Maryland, and were sold as bondsmen for seven years to the planters. When their term expired some of these ex-bondsmen ctune home, and some remained in the land of their exile and called out friends from home to join them there. Upwards of fifty years ago. Mr Shiels, R.S.JL. who before 1SC6 spent many vears in the south of the United States painting portraits,- told me that when he was in Maryland he was informed that in a corner of that State there was a community of several thousands who still spoke Gaelic in their homes a lid retained many Highland customs. Those who were banished to Barbadoes. Jamaica, and other West Indian Islands were not founders of Gaelic- speaking communities like those banished to Mary land, or General Oglethorpe s Carolina emigrants, or the later emigrants to Cape Breton and Nova Scotia, hot they undoubtedly drew many other Highlanders after them.
In his description of James the Fourth to his sovereign Ferdinand, the Spanish ambassador, DOB Pedro de Ayala. enumerates the many learned and foreign languages which that charming, chivalrous, and rash King of Scots could speak, and says: — *• His own Scotch language is as different from English as Arragonese is from Castilian. The King speaks besides, the language of the savages who lire in some parts of Scotland and in the Islands. It is «i different from Sootab m Binayan b from Castikn." Doit Pedro accepted without investigation the epi-
SCOTI VAGI. 55
thets applied to the Highlanders by the Lowlanders, who had some justification in raids, spoliations and clan feuds, and civil war commotion, for calling the Highlanders " savages." In Hill Burton's " History of Scotland " the old race rancour between Lowlands and Highlands manifests itself without much abate- ment. But Hill Burton and other Lowland and general historians overlook the fact that a long- continued pacific Highland invasion, meeting there with the primitive survivals of the Britons of Strathclyde, and the Picts of Galloway, celticised Lowland Scotland itself to an extraordinary degree. Let anyone look at the present day names in assess- ment rolls, at the shop signs, the office and firm names, and count up those which are unmistakeably Gaelic — pushing the semi-disguised forms aside — and he will be driven to the conclusion that the Celtic element in the present day population of Scotland is stronger than any other one.
The adoption of Chatham's scheme for enlisting Highland valour in defence of the British Empire, by raising Highland regiments commanded by High- land gentlemen whom the men were ready to follow anywhere, and with them to do whatever mortal courage, obedience, and endurance could achieve in war, laid the foundation for broad Imperial patriot- ism in the Highlands, and brought such a new glory and strength to the British Army that, all down from the capture of Quebec to Waterloo, the Government looked upon Gaeldom as a nursery of soldiers, and in various ways discouraged emigration — especially to the United States. Proprietors who by raising quotas of men got commissions for them- selves or their sons and relations, and who moreover cherished kindly sympathies and frequently com-
56 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
munity of hereditary ties with their tenants, like- wise discouraged emigration. And although the steady old migration to the Lowlands, and — since the Union of the Crowns — to England, went on in a stronger stream from year to year, and a large number of the young men went into the Army and Navy, the population of the Highlands became more and more crowded than it ever had been before, between 1760 and the end of the century. Mean- while the sheep regime, by absorbing the great upland shealings and leading to the consolidation of the winter-town holdings, was aggravating the crowding, and by degrees the profits of domestic industries were departing. But during the long war with France prices for wool, sheep, cattle, horses, and surplus of crops, had so much gone up that while old leases lasted the tenants prospered. Whenever the leases expired rents went up, and on the heels of higher rents, prices went down as the time of inflation was followed by depression.
CHAPTER VII. GLENLYON AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD.
THE old system of farming was yet making a stiff fight with the new one, although flocks of blackfaced sheep were on all the brae shealings and on all the hills connected with arable land in the lower end of the Glen. One large shealing called Rialt was, till after 1840, held by Breadalbane tenants whose winter-towns were a good distance away, and the Roro tenants had a shealing in the shadow of Ben- lawers on their own hill, and so had the four tenants
GLENLYON AND ITS NEIGHBOUEHOOD. 57
of the Eight Merkland of Kerrumore and Craigelig, of whom my father was one, in their own Conaglen. The population was thrice as numerous as it is now. The people were industrious, well clothed, comfort- ably housed, and sufficiently supplied with simple frugal and healthy food, such as meal, butcher meat, milk, butter, cheese, and potatoes. Up till 1845, potatoes were at their best and so abundant that, with fish on the Islands and the West Coast, and with mutton, braxy, pork, and milk, butter, and cheese on the mainland, they formed the chief item in the dietary of the humbler classes ; oatcakes, barley scones, and porridge taking secondary rank, especially after the short crop of 1826. As much land as their little middens would manure was given to cottars freely by the farmers, who also bestowed gifts of potatoes on the poor and helpless out of charity. There was a wonderful amount of charity, mutual help and sympathy, among the Glenlyon inhabitants of my early years. No doubt it was so throughout the Highlands generally, as the con- ditions and connections were so much alike every- where. According to their surnames, our Glen people were descended from twelve or more different clans. But by centuries of inter-marriage they had all become a kind of one clan through affinity and consanguinity. They did not approve of the marriage of first cousins, but unless a man, as happened pretty often, brought a bride from another parish, he could not marry a Glen girl with whom he was not related more distantly than first cousin- hood. While kinship near or far made it the duty of the comfortably -off to help those that were badly - off, usually through no fault of their own, it likewise filled the strugglers with such pride of independence
58 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
that, however hardly tried, none of them took the road as beggars going with meal-pokes from door to door. What a lonely woman did was, at clipping time, to go round the fanks "air faoigh ollatnh" ; in other words, to ask for puckles of wool, which she took home and spun and so turned into money. Men who drifted into helplessness often quartered themselves for the end of their days on well-to-do relations who did not grudge them their keep.
In our Glen a clannish community through inter-marriage was thus formed by people of many surnames. It was much the same in the neigh- bouring glens and districts. There never existed on the south side of the Grampians a parish or barony or estate of many farms that was inhabited by people of one surname. I question whether the ideal of one-clan or one-descent ever existed any- where on the Highland mainland, or in the larger islands, whatever might be the case in the smaller islands. The one-stock clan idea came out of a precedent Celtic system which was superseded by the feudal system. When the clans in the four- teenth century began to raise their heads, they had, in order to succeed, to graft their idea on feudalism, and to accept the mixed population that had gathered themselves under it. On the other hand holders of feudal charters like the Seton- Gordons, the Frasers, Menzieses, Chisholms, etc., had to act like Celtic chiefs to make their charters good.
The abolition of the large brae shealings, and the consolidation of some of the lower farms, almost put an end to the summer life romance so dearly remembered by my seniors, and cramped a growing population on the part of the Glen which had most of the arable land. The coming necessity for
GLENLYON AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD. 59
voluntary emigration or landlord eviction of people for whom there was no room or opening in the Glen was plainly foreshadowed, and understood by the people themselves, who, besides the chronic drifting southward, had sent off swarms of emigrants to Canada before 1820. But until the abolition of the club-farms, which was completed in or about 1850, the old industrial order struggled to hold its ground. It was, however, for the last ten years of that struggle, being pressed to death between the two millstones of sheep rule and the lost value of the " calanas " or spinning industry of the women. The manufacturing inventions of the preceding century led to the putting up of water-mills for wool and cotton ; but until steam power was introduced the coalless parts of the country did not realise that they were doomed to lose their domestic industries, nor did they lose them at once, although gradually they began to be less and less profitable. Flax- growing, followed by its spinning and weaving, was a great and very ancient industry in Glenlyon, and indeed in all parts of the Highlands where good flax could be grown in suitable soil, which was as carefully prepared, manured, and weeded as garden beds. Splendid flax was grown in Glenlyon, and fine yarn and linen were produced therefrom, by following the processes of cultivation, steeping, scutching, heckling, and spinning, which had come down from the days of old, and which were carried out by simple means, without any innovation, until towards the end of the eighteenth century, scutch- ing mills relieved the home workers of part of the initiative drudgery. The lassies, who went with their mothers and the milch cows to the shealirigs, were early taught to spin on the hillsides while
60 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
they were tending calves, by distaff and spindle, while their elders were busy at their wheels within the huts, between milking times. The cheapness of Manchester cotton goods never so wholly destroyed the value of the Highland flax-spinning and weaving that it should have been abandoned. In spite of the discouragement caused by the cheap cotton industry, Ulster kept its linen industry and made it pay all through. It never was more flourishing than it is at present. But it is an industry which can only thrive in a well-populated rural district ; and Ulster was never depopulated by a sheep- regime invasion and a craze for large farms like the Highlands. Should the central Highlands ever go back to farms of moderately small size — something much larger than crofts — the linen industry might be revived with much advantage.
To return to the old order in Glenlyon, all the hard field and hill work was done by the men, while dairy-work, house-work, and the important " calanas" by which all were clothed, and chests were filled with blankets and webs of linen, and revenue secured by the export sale of linen and woolen yarns, fell within the special domain of the women. As long as the large far off shealings remained, the women had a smaller share than they had afterwards in harvest work or field work of any kind. But before and afterwards there was plenty of work for both sexes although the remuneration was not in propor- tion to the care and labour bestowed on the work. It fell as a heavy task to the men in addition to the legitimate farm work, that they had to thatch, repair, and rebuild homes, byres, barns, and stables, pro- prietors giving nothing but the timber as it stood uncut in the woods. The cutting and winning of
GLENLYON AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD. 61
peats formed part of the ordinary farm labour. The manifold calls on their ingenuity and forethought made both sexes very diligent and resourceful. They formed, as it were, a self-contained, self-sustained, self-sufficing community. Whether they went as small feuars to dig out Flanders Moss, or emigrated to the Canadian forests, they took with them a hundred self-helping arts and qualities which in most cases ensured success. They were not, as a class, so well fitted to prosper in manufacturing towns, although some of them did prosper there both as merchants and manufacturers. I do not think that there could possibly be better nurseries for soldiers and pioneers of empire, or better training schools for agricultural emigrants to the colonies, than were the Highland mainland communities that remained substantially under the old order for a century after the reign of law was established on Culloden Moor and the Church of Scotland covered the country with schools. Soldiers, Hudson Bay Company servants, adventurers and emigrants, took with them everywhere self-helpful resources of many kinds, and a standard of morals which even the wastrels among them could never forget nor violate without prickings of remorse. That standard of morals had Shorter Catechism teaching for its back- bone, but that steel-like backbone was invested in the warm flesh, skin and blood of Highland chivalry and undying love of native land.
62 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
CHAPTER VIII.
SOME PARISH HISTORY.
THE parish of Fortingall was in area less like a parish than a small county. The Reformation sup- plied it with one parish minister and one parish school-master, who lived close to each other at Fortingall village. It was a long time before Glenlyon and Rannoch were each provided with side-schools, the latter with one at the upper end and another at the lower end of Loch Rannoch. It was in the latter that Dugald Buchanan taught during the early part of Mr Macara's long ministry. The earliest of the Glenlyon schools was set up at Innerwick, and the second at Roro. Mr Ferguson, minister of Fortingall parish from 1719 to 1752, was an uncompromising upholder of the Revolution Settlement and Presbyterian doctrines and discipline. He made himself a sort of terror to the Jacobite lairds of the parish, and was accordingly much detested by them. He succeeded, in 1719, Mr Alexander Robertson, who had been deposed for having read treasonable papers from the pulpit at the time of the 1715 rising. Mr Ferguson during the '45 rising acted with the full courage of his con- victions, and when Prince Charlie was at Castle Menzies, within a few miles of his church and manse, increased rather than diminished the emphasis of his denunciations. In 1752 he died from a cold which he caught through having fallen into the river from an upset boat. For over thirty years his ministry
SOME PARISH HISTORY. 63
was a long fight with ignorance, immorality, dis- orderliness, and adverse heritors, who, I believe, with the sole exception of Sir Robert Menzies, were Jacobites, and, as long as he lived, adherents to the deposed minister, Mr Robertson, who became an Episcopalian. It was said that at first Mr Ferguson tried conciliation, but if he did he found it of no use, and he soon went on the war-path, which he never afterwards left. About 1726 he forced an augmen- tation of stipend on his heritors. Immediately before his death he compelled them to renovate his manse, which, in spite of remonstrances, they had long refused to do. While this work of renovation was going on, he went to lodge with his wife's relatives at Laggan on the other side of the river— hence the river crossing and the boat accident, about which there was a whispered suspicion that it was less accident than a malicious Jacobite trick to give the strong-handed minister a ducking. Be that as it may, Mr Ferguson died of the cold he got by the immersion. He died, was buried, and then the groundless story arose, from a light having been seen in the vacant manse, that after death he walked and found no rest until he had an interview with his successor. His successor was as much a Church militant warrior as himself. His lot fell on happier times, and he was able to carry much further the work of reform which Mr Ferguson had begun. In 1715 the men of the parish of Fortingall, gentry and commons, rose spontaneously on behalf of the Stuart dynasty. They thought it disgraceful that a " wee, wee German lairdie " should succeed Queen Anne in the place of her brother. They had not bothered their heads much so far about the religious and con- stitutional questions which came home so acutely to
64 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
hearts and minds in other parts of the country. They had no persecution during the Restoration period. With two or three exceptions the ministers of the then big Presbytery of Dunkeld, if half of them Vicars of Bray by compliance, were worthy men who kept on the old order of worship arid forms of discipline without innovation. The only novelty was the re-introduction of a bishop, who was not personally objectionable. It was remembered how before the Restoration, Monk and his Cromwellian troops ruled the Perthshire Highlands from Finlarig, and how humiliating the rule was to Scotland although it produced unwonted order, stopped the cattle-raiders, was justly administered, and, outside national sentiment, had little of the bitterness of conquest. But, good or bad, they would not tolerate Saxon rule again if they could help it, and whatever evils Whig Statesmen and Lowlanders might predict, they would fight for placing the right heir on the British throne. So they fought and were much disappointed in many ways. Mar was an incompetent commander who by delay allowed the Duke of Argyll to scrape together a small army, which won the results of victory at Sheriffmuir although the battle itself was indecisive. When at at last the " right heir " presented himself to his discomfited and angry army at Perth, his gloomy countenance chilled their returning ardour. But worst of all for Jacobitism in the parish of Fortingall was the different treatment received by followers and leaders after the suppression of the Rebellion. Old Culdares — then a young man whose supposed minority was used as a plea in his favour— John Campbell of Glenlyon, and Struan, the poet chief of the Robertsons, after a short exile in France, were
SOME PARISH HISTORY. 65
pardoned and restored to their estates, while the common men were sent to be sold as seven years' bondsmen to the plantations. Popular resentment arising from this difference of treatment was not lessened by the stories returned bondsmen had to relate. And in the thirty years between the two risings education had been spreading, and the power of the Church had grown into a real check on the old undivided sway of feudal proprietors. Between one thing and another the '45 rising on the south of the Grampians, and in most places on the north side likewise, was far less spontaneous than had been the ' 1 5 rising. In the parish of Fortingall, Old Culdares, John Campbell of Glenlyon, and Alexander Robertson of Struan, who had been in the former rebellion, were still to the fore. Culdares was still in the prime of life, but although steeped to the neck in Jacobite intrigues, was far too prudent to endanger that neck a second time. He sent a gift horse to Prince Charles, and remained at home. His second son held a com- mission in King George's army, and he was trying to get civil service employment for his elder son. He wanted to be safe whatever happened. He thought that Cluny would succeed in getting the Glenlyon men out while he himself kept aloof ; especially as Cluny and his Badenoch warriors had just, under threats of fire and sword, forced out Sir Robert Menzies's tenants, little to their own liking and far less to the liking of their chief. The Glen- lyon men flatly refused to come out at Cluny's call, and wanted to know why he did not begin by getting Culdares to rise with him. Culdares plotted and would not rise. But Glenlyon and Struan, who were now too old to fight or even to ride, were
5
66 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
as full of enthusiasm as they were in the former rebellion. Glenlyon, whose eldest son was in King George's army, and had earned praise and the right to promotion at Fontenoy, sent his youngest son, Archibald, a mere youth, along with a son of Duneaves, to call out the men on the Culdares estate, and about thirty of them responded at once to what was to them a sort of hereditary call ; for although Glenlyon had nothing then of the old glen barony but the empty name, he was the repre- sentative of those who in peace and war had led the Glen men for two centuries. Struan fired the heather in Rannoch, although stricken by age and infirmities. The two all-daring veteran rebels did another thing, in conjunction with a younger Sheriffmuir comrade of theirs, Menzies of Shian, which was both romantic and clever. They carried the fiery cross round Breadalbane to raise recruits for Prince Charles, and the device did succeed in raising a few. The Earl of Breadalbane was spending the closing years of a rather useless life at Bath, while his capable and energetic son, Lord Gleuorchy, was from Taymouth ruling Breadalbane and striving with might and main to hold it for the Government. The three Sheriffmuir veterans got in with their fiery cross under his guard, and wiled away some of his men, but he kept the bulk of them in his regiment, and also as many of the Glenlyon men as had not gone to fight and fall or fly at Culloden. Mr Ferguson volleyed and thundered against rebellion from the pulpit of Fortingall Church, and the ministers of the neighbouring parishes were working on the same side, if in a less belligerent strain, while Lord Glenorchy was gathering up into a fighting host the Highlanders
SOME PARISH HISTORY. 67
who had imbibed Church of Scotland political views, and had got the keys of knowledge, reading, writing, and arithmetic, in parish schools and side schools. The '45 rising, which was far more disastrous than the '15 to the propertied rebels, possesses a dazzling amount of meteoric splendour. Unlike his gloomy father, Prince Charles had the gift of fascinating his Highland followers, who, through the accounts they gave of him to their children and children's children, exercised a reflected mes- meric influence on succeeding generations of people who detested the principles of his dynasty, and who knew about the inglorious latter years of his own life.
Long and stoutly as Mr Ferguson fought for the Presbyterian conquest of the whole of the unwieldily large parish of Fortingall, by the combined forces of religion and education, he had to leave to Mr Macara the hard task of bringing all Rannoch to the same orderly condition as Fortingall, Glenlyon, and Bolfracks. The lower half of Rannoch, although Jacobite and anti-Presbyterian, was not particularly unruly. The unruly elements gathered in the braes and woods belonging to Struan. In the cattle- lifting days Lochaber and Rannoch raiders were usually co-workers. These days were now over, but thieves of both districts were still at work in a small way. When Mr Macara was inducted as minister of the parish, I believe that rebel and thief, the Sergeant Mor, was still at large and living on the country. His refuge cave was in Troscraig, between Rannoch and Glenlyon. An incident in his early life prejudiced Mr Macara against Rannoch evil- doers, and an incident in his early ministerial career confirmed that early unfavourable impression. Mr
68 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
Macara's father was a saw -miller, carpenter, and timber merchant, at Crieff, who bought a quantity of fir timber from Struan. Mr Macara, then a big lad, wearing a new pair of stout Lowland boots, came with his father's men and horses to fell and fetch away the purchased timber. As the lad was one day at work out of his comrades' sight and hearing, a big thief jumped on his back, and, having thrown him, stripped off his boots. The incident in his early ministerial career was of a different and, from his point of view, of a far more heinous descrip- tion. He had been up to the head of the loch, preaching and catechising, where his duties detained him to a late hour. He was making his way to Kinloch through the pine-wood, when he was stopped by armed men, who pulled him off his horse, dragged him into the wood, where were an old man, an old woman, and a younger one with an ailing infant child. He was ordered on pain of death to baptise the child there and then. He knew his leading assailant to be a married man, and had heard during his perambulations that a servant maid had lately born a child to him. The child got ill, and the poor mother was terribly afraid of its dying un- baptised. So was the father of it, who was far from being thoroughly evil and inhuman, although passionate and violent. The minister, telling the man that he would call him to account for his double misconduct, accepted the girl's father and mother as sponsors, and there and then by torch- light in the pinewood, baptised the child, who did not die of its infantile ailments. Mr Macara was not vindictive nor revengeful although a hard dis- ciplinarian. In this case he had an opportunity for giving unruly parishioners an impressive exhibition
SOME PARISH HISTORY. 69
of Church power and discipline. He had the offender in a cleft stick, for had he not violated the law of the land as well as the law of the Church ? The minister did not appeal to the law of the land, but he carried out the law of the Church in regard to adulterers to the utmost extent; and the man, who was well connected, fearing the criminal prosecution to which he was liable, escaped that danger by making twenty-six appearances as a penitent, most of them in the parish church of Fortingall, and some at Kinloch and Killichonain when the parish minister preached and baptised children there. Similar work was going on in the less unruly parishes. A power, as all saw, had arisen in the land which claimed the right, in God's name, of supervising faith and morals without fear or favour. Mr Macara had elders ordained in every part of his parish, who, along with teachers and catechists, formed what might be called his field army. He had no difficulty with Fortin- gall, Glenlyon, and Bolfracks, and he overcame his difficulties in Rannoch.
Church and school were in those days one and indivisible, although the parish schoolmaster had his " ad vitam aut culpam " tenure. It had always been so, amidst all State and Church mutations from the Reformation downwards. The parish schools of the Perthshire Highlands were not neglected during the Restoration period, but they were few and far between, and it was only after 1 700 that the wide gaps outside began to be filled up by humble but very useful side schools. Glen- lyon had three of these schools before I was born. One was at Innervar, another at Roro, and the third at Innerwick. The last was the oldest of the three ; for the story of the laying of the ghost in
70 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
Meggernie Castle by its schoolmaster shows that it must have been set up before 1700. But somehow it fell behind the other two before my birth, for instead of having, like them, a settled teacher, it was taught by ever-changing teachers, young men from parish schools who were aiming at going to the Universities, or who were qualifying for getting parish schools. They got their board and lodging at the farmhouses, moving about after their pupils. It was not in all respects a satisfactory arrangement, and it was surely very primitive, but the annually or almost annually changing teachers diligently and efficiently taught the three R's. In the preceding century Glenlyon turned out three or four ministers and two advocates, as well as some army officers and clerks and schoolmasters. The elder of the two advocates was Angus Fletcher, who earned the great distinction of being called " The Father of Burgh Reform." The younger one's career, which promised to be a brilliant one, was cut short by early death. He was a son of the Roro school- master, Robert Macarthur, and a nephew of Mr Macarthur, minister of Kilfinan in Mull. About 1800, Leyden, the border poet, made an excursion to the Highlands in search of remains of Ossianic poetry and traditions. Among many others he interviewed this Mull minister, who was then an old man, and who told him something that seems to indicate that a learning that was never taught in the side-schools, but had come down from ancient days, existed in Glenlyon far down into the 18th century. Mr Macarthur told Leyden that when he was a student at St Andrews, he had, by means of the carrier who brought him supplies from home, regular fortnightly correspondence with his father, who had no command
SOME tARISH HISTORY. 71
of English, and who wrote his Gaelic epistles to him, not in the Roman but in the Irish characters. Another of the Glenlyon ministers of the 1 8th cen- tury was Mr Macdiarmid, who was minister of Weem for fifty years— 1778 to 1828. Until Glen- lyon was made a quod sacra parish, the minister of Weem had to preach a certain number of Sundays annually in the Glen, because the Roro district belonged to his parish, and the minister of Kenmore also held an annual service or two there because his parishioners crowded with their cattle to the sheal- ing of the Rialt, which, however, was in the parish of Fortingall. Of the schoolmasters that Glenlyon turned out in the 18th century, one was Archibald Macdiarmid, the maternal grandfather of Sir Noel Paton ; another was Duncan Lothian, Dugald Buchanan's pupil and fellow-worker, who made a felicitously-rhymed gathering of Highland proverbial sayings which commences so :—
'Nuair a chailleas neach a mhaoin,
'S gnothuch faoin bhi 'g iarraidh meas :
Ged do labhair e le ceill,
'S beag a gheibh e dh'eisdeas ris.
Clever boys like the two brothers of Duncan the Fool could go direct from the Fortingall parish school to the Universities of St Andrews and Edin- burgh, but similarly clever Glenlyon and Rannoch boys who aspired to the higher education were much handicapped by having to go to the parish or some further-oif and more costly intermediate school to get qualified for entering on their college career. But where there was a strong will, a way was found to overcome the difficulties.
72 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
CHAPTER IX.
CURSOKY REMARKS ON THE OSSIAN1C CONTROVERSY.
GLENLYON and Fortingall people were not behind other Highlanders in defending Macpherson's "Ossian" against Dr Johnson and other assailants. They boasted that they had twelve forts of the Feinne and Dun-Ossian named after the great bard in their glen. Eight of the forts, which they' called Castullau nam Fiann — not "caistealan," as they called the Castles of Meggernie and Garth, Weem and Taymouth, and the like — are still visible, and so, of course, is Dun-Ossian. They had screeds of Ossianic poetry — to place all the poetic ancient poetry under one label — and prose tales handed down through many generations, which contained the personal names and most of the incidents which Macpherson had manipulated ; so how could the genuineness or authenticity of his English " Ossian" be doubted by anyone less pigheaded than that "Ollamh Maclan," who wrapped himself in a mantle of prejudice and invincible ignorance to such a degree that he denied the existence of documents written in Gaelic which were older than a few score years before his own time ? They knew that James Macgregor, Vicar of Fortingall, before he became Dean of Lismore, and his brother Duncan, had put down in writing between 1500 and 1530 a great deal of the Ossianic poetry then current in the Highlands, and which with little change had remained current until Macpherson had made his
THE OSSIAKIC CONTROVERSY. 73
gathering of manuscripts and materials. They ad- mitted that his "Ossian" did not in all respects agree with their traditional poetry and prose tales, but they readily jumped to the conclusion that in the Western Isles Macpherson had got hold of manuscripts that contained the poetry and tales in fuller and better form than did their traditional lore. It was only after Macpherson's death and the publi- cation of his Gaelic "Ossian" that they were reluc- tantly driven to doubt his good faith. As for his having located the Feinne in Alba instead of in Ireland, that had been done long before his time. And truly the localisation in Ireland is open to much the same objection as the Albania one. The mythological and prehistoric belongings of the Celtic race were in both countries freely used to invest new scenes and personages with romantic glamour and ancient drapery. Dr Johnson was utterly wrong in maintaining that there was no ancient Gaelic literature ; but he was right in saying that Macpherson's English "Ossian" as presented to the world was an imposture. The Gaelic " Ossian " is not an original but a translation of his English one into good eighteenth century Gaelic. He was a man of genius, but an unprincipled manipulator of materials which, in the main, were undeniably genuine. Subsequent publications of really old Celtic literature have equally confounded him and his John Bull assailant, Dr Johnson.
74 REMINISCENCES AMD REFLECTIONS.
CHAPTER X.
THE UNWEILDY PARISH DIVIDED INTO THREE.
A SHORT time before my birth, and a good many years after Mr Macara's death, the latter's dream of ecclesiastical reform was fulfilled by the erection of Glenlyon and Rannoch into quoad sacra parishes. Each of them got a minister and kirk session of its own, a manse and glebe, a new church and an en- dowment of £120 a year out of the thanksgiving parliamentary grant made after the long struggle with Napoleon. It was complained at the time that the Church of England got much more than its fair proportionate share of that grant, but, at anyrate, the portion of it given to the Church of Scotland did a vast deal of good in the Highlands. The parish of Fortingall, formed soon after the Reformation, was properly and legally styled the united parishes of Fortingall and Killichonain, which meant Rannoch. The patronage of the former be- longed to the Earls and Dukes of Atholl, and of the latter to the Knights and Baronets of Weem, and the joint patrons exercised their rights by turns ; and it is only just to say that the ministers pre- sented by them were, upon the whole, good workers who were worthy of their vocation. Duncan Macaulay, the first Protestant minister of Fortingall, was appointed by the Crown. He lived in peace with his Catholic predecessor's curate, who was allowed to retain manse, glebe, and other perquisites till his death about 1580. Mr Macaulay was an
DIVIDED INTO THREE. 75
active promoter of Reformation doctrines and organisation, who often preached at Kenmore, Dull, and Killin, until these parishes got Protestant ministers of their own. His influence also extended to the lower part of Rannoch, but although sup- ported by the Weem family, who owned the '' Slis-miu," styled in charters the Barony of Rannoch, the sons of misrule connected with Lochaber and Clan Gregor raiders were then, and for a hundred years to come, beyond the control of ecclesiastical and feudal authorities. There as everywhere the "broken men," who, when Stuart kings ruled, were denounced arid hunted down as thieves, cut-throats, and outlaws, and who, when caught, were executed, exiled, or transported to the colonies, suddenly blossomed into extreme Jacobite loyalty when rebellions and civil broils promised spoils and oppor- tunities for displaying the martial qualities in which they undoubtedly excelled. It required the military pacification which came after Culloden, and all the efforts of resolute Mr Macara and his groups of elders and catechist-schoolmasters to put a final end to the disorders which, with a short exception in James the Fourth's reign, had been chronic in the braes of Rannoch from the murder of James I. downwards.
76 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
CHAPTER XL
KKLIGIOUS REVIVAL.
THE revival movement in the south which is particularly connected with the names of the two brothers, Robert and James Haldaue, met a ready response, or evoked a corresponding " dusgadh " or awakening, over a large part of the Highlands. The ground for this "dusgadh" was prepared by the evangelical preaching in churches, the teaching in Sunday and week schools, the publication of the Gaelic Bible, and the institution of family worship, which, beginning with the elders, soon came to be general, and if not held daily, was held at least once a week. I cannot remember how I came to learn to read Gaelic, for it was not taught in our day school, but I have no doubt I and many others learned it very young from looking at the books at family worship. The religious revival took a great hold in Breadalbaue, Glenlyon, and in Rannoch also. It had passed from its missionary stage to its separatist one before Glenlyon and Rannoch were made into parishes with ministers and sessions of their own. At first there was no intention of forming new religious bodies. But it came to that. Although in other respects there was no difference between the doctrines preached by evangelical parish min- isters and those of the revivalists, a fulcrum for separatism was found in the question of baptism. It was indeed a double question. Should not baptism be by immersion instead of sprinkling ?
RELIGIOUS REVIVAL. 77
Should it not only be administered to adults who gave evidence of being converted and took the vows on themselves ? The Haldane brothers on these two questions accepted the teaching of the English Baptists, and many of their followers in Highlands and Lowlands joined with them in forming Baptist congregations. Small congregations of that kind were formed in many places between the Forth and the Spey. We had one in Glenlyon which continued to exist and do good until its excellent minister, Mr Donald Maclellan, died at a very advanced age about twenty years ago. The unpaid pastor of this small congregation in my early days was Mr Maclellan's father-in-law, the fine, genial old Highlander, Archibald Macarthur, our miller, who in the Sunday school worked harmoniously with our minister, Mr David Campbell, although argumentative enough on the baptism question. A rich mine of local and traditional lore was the worthy Muilear Mor. He made Scripture scenes, characters and incidents, seem all real and vividly alive to us youngsters by throwing over them the glow of his poetic imagination in graphic Gaelic. The Grantown- on - Spey hymn - poet, Mr Peter Grant, and Mr William Tulloch from Atholl, used to come as visi- tors and field-preachers to the Glen in the miller's time of leadership, and so did Donnachadh Chalum Thaileir, a glen Highlander from Paisley. Baptist congregations have now, I believe, ceased to exist in Breadalbane, Glenlyon, and Rannoch. When the missionary revivalists split up into parties, the majority of them remained in the Church of Scot- land, into which they introduced a hotter and more intolerant spirit than many of her best evangelical ministers wholly approved of. They deterred
78 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
worthy people, who could not honestly say they had gone through a process of conversion and obtained an assurance of forgiveness, from becoming communi- cants. Hypocrites who made loud professions im- posed upon them until they were found out. They looked upon men with life-long blameless records, including elders of the old stamp, as being devoid of the unction of grace, and little better than heathens. Hysterical revival epouters called the old people who had only a good record of morality and humble practical faith, "Gray Egyptians," and later on " Black Moderates." I was without a brother, and although I had plenty of boy cousins, and enjoyed boyish pranks and school play and scrapes, I felt lonely at times, and liked nothing better than to sit at the feet of the "Gray Egyptians" and listen attentively to their talk. They were full of stories of the olden times, which hugely delighted me. They gave the revivalists credit for good intentions, but said they were doing evil unconsciously in denouncing innocent enjoyments such as dancing and singing of songs, practised by the preceding generations. They unfavourably compared the morality of the revival period with that of the last twenty-five years of Mr Macara's spiritual superin- tendence, during which they said there had been only two illegitimate children born in Glenlyon. They regretted that there were no resident landlords in the Glen to modify, by their influence, the new religious tyranny, which, with all the good it was doing or intending to do, was being pushed to a height of intolerance which would only end in evil. The "Gray Egyptians" agreed with Duncan the Fool, who, when an enthusiast from a field-service came into the farmer's house where he was staying,
RELIGIOUS REVIVAL. 79
and, without sitting down, began to sermonise, drew near the old mother of the family and whispered, "Biomaid taingeil do Dhia gu'n d'fhag e ar ciall againn" — " Let us be thankful to God that he has left us our reason ! "
But the religious revival was a genuine force which had far-reaching consequences. The result first seen was that the awakening made the Church of Scotland stronger and more zealous in good works than had ever, in the Highlands at least, been the case before. The hiving off by small Baptist com- munites and the formation of a very few congrega- tions of Independents only stimulated the activity and increased the power of the national Church between 1810 and 1843.
The custom of having only one communion a year in each parish had been long established throughout the Highlands. It was a necessity in the early days of the Reformation when Gaelic speaking ministers were rare, and even readers, who could not baptise or officiate at communions, were not sufficiently numerous for holding ordinary services of prayer, scripture reading, and exhortation in all parishes. Few Highland places were so well equipped as Glenlyon with its converted and married clerk, Niven, and Fortingall with Mr Duncan Mac- aulay, who, for some years, had also Dull, Kenmore and Killin apparently under his superintending care. The custom which arose out of a temporary necessity rooted itself like a tree of life in the habits of the Highland people. It replaced the pre- Reformation pilgrimages and suited their social instincts ; for it brought together gatherings of people from neighbouring parishes to the field preaching connected with the dispensing of the
80 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
communion inside churches. There was much decorus hospitality and the visiting went round, for the holding of communions was so arranged that ministers could assist one another on those occasions, and the parishioners could follow their ministers in crowds to the places where the communions were held and the field preaching took place. In the contentious years before the Disruption I often listened to the tent preaching of Mr, afterwards Dr, Macdonald of Ferintosh, whose eldest daughter was the wife of our minister, and who was an annual visitor to Glenlyon and Breadalbane at the com- munion season. We called him the " Domhnullach Mor," or Great Macdonald, but he is best known in the Ten Years' Conflict annals by the designation of " The Apostle of the North." It is true that I was young and susceptible, but I think he was, in Gaelic, the most wonderfully eloquent, poetical and mesmeric speaker I ever listened to, and I may add that I heard most of the other Disruption celebrities and afterwards many of England's famous orators, clerical and political. Peace be to his ashes ! I do not remember that be ever introduced into his sermons the controversial topics of the day. He spoke more like an inspired evangelist than an ecclesiastical partisan. His presence at a communion always caused a huge multitude from far and near to assemble.
SOCIAL, LIFE AND MORALS. 81
CHAPTER XII.
SOCIAL LIFE AND MORALS.
I HAVE read much, seen much, and lived long, and I do not think it within human nature possi- bilities that there ever could be or can be a more morally blameless community of a thousand people than was the one in which I was born and brought up. Of course there were a few wastrels, and not every one of the honestly industrious people was either a born or a converted saint. My friends the Gray Egyptians said that too much religious rule and teaching had done more evil than good, that it had knocked joyousness out of life, and rather lowered than raised the standard of honour, truth- fulness, and sense of duty which existed in their own young days and in the days of their fathers. And I think the history of the Glen after Culloden, to a certain extent, bore out their contentions. Between 1830 and 1843 the spiritual power ruled without a check. Of the three proprietors none was resident. Culdares was a minor away in Eng- land at school and college. Chesthill resided down at Duneaves, Fortingall, and Lord Breadalbane had no residence on his Roro estate, which he seldom if ever visited. Divided into wards, each of which had an elder or two, the Glen was wholly ruled in the years mentioned by minister and kirk session. It was good, wholesome rule, although needlessly intolerant in regard to the dancing, fiddling, song-
6
82 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
singing, tale-telling amusements, and shinty play, putting-stone, and hammer-throwing games of pre- ceding generations. It was a rule which regularised wakes, and put an end to excesses at weddings and funerals. " Render to Csesar " preaching did more than excisemen and cuttersmen to convince Glen farmers that smuggling was sinful and should be discontinued. It was not easy to convince any Highland growers of here and barley that the Eng- lish Parliament had not done them gross injustice in the whisky business, and that they had not a perfect moral right to convert their grain into malt and whisky, which found a ready market in the Lowlands, and made it easy for them to pay their rents. Glenlyon smuggling was almost brought to an end before I began to range over hills and to take note of the secret places in which, not long before, whisky used to be secretly distilled. The old Highland smugglers, unlike modern ones, turned out splendidly manufactured whisky, which, how- ever, required some maturing delay before it attained its perfection. My dear old friend, Mr Murray-Macgregor, minister of Balquhidder, gave me more than once a taste of smuggler's whisky, distilled in Glenbuckie thirty or forty years before then. It was singularly aromatic. It did not grip the throat like raw whisky, but it sent quickly a pleasant feeling of warmth through one's whole body. The excise people had seized the smuggler's big barrel when he was taking it to the Lowlands. After having been declared forfeited by the Gal- lander Justices of the Peace, it was sold, and one of them, Captain Stewart of Glenbuckie, bought it. In 1846 Captain Stewart's son sold Glenbuckie to Mr David Carnegie, and went to Argyllshire, where
SOCIAL LIFE AND MORALS. 83
he bought the Island of Coll. On leaving Bal- quhidder, he gave the minister what remained of the smuggler's whisky — a half-dozen bottles or so— which for the next twenty years the minister doled out to friends as a real curiosity. This leads me to another little story of smuggled whisky. In 1826 Archibald Stewart, Craigelig (Gilleaspa Mor), one of the four partners in our Eight Merkland club farm, was about to marry my aunt, Mary Campbell. He was as strictly honest and honour- able a man as ever stood in shoe leather, but he thought it then no sin nor shame to make the whisky for his own wedding out of his own "eorna." He made a good deal more than \vas consumed at the wedding. He put the surplus — I forget how many gallons — in a big earthen jar, which, carefully stoppered, he carried on a dark night to Car Dun- shiaig, and buried it there in a peat bog where it was to stay hidden until wanted for sale or use. Weeks or months elapsed before he went to see in daylight the place in which he buried the jar on a mirk night. He then searched for it in vain, for in the interval a great flood had washed away his marks and very much changed the whole face of the moss. For the next nineteen years at every sheep gathering he took the beat that led him through Car Dunshiaig, and in passing he searched for his lost jar with a long iron probe, but he never found it. Gilleaspa Mor, with a large family, a mother ninety years old, and two widowed sisters with large families, emigrated in 1846 to the London district of Ontario, where there was a brother previously settled and glad to give them all a hearty welcome. Now, 1908, there is a large clan of Stewarts, exclusive of the many descendants of daughters, representing the two
84 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
brothers in Ontario and Manitoba. Gilleaspa Mor was perfectly sure that no one but himself knew about the burial of the jar in Dunshiaig moss, and almost equally confident that if by chance anyone found it, the discovery would have been revealed to him. From the anti-septic, hermetically-sealing nature of peat, it is likely that the whisky is still contained in the buried jar, and if so, and it is ever found, a bottle of it would be a gift for a king. It must not be supposed that much of the whisky illicitly distilled before smuggling was cried down by the Church was consumed in the Glen itself, for that was not the case. It was made for export and profit, and the very magistrates who sat in judgment on detected smugglers had a good deal of sympathy with them. The obstinate belief of Glenlyon men that they were wronged and robbed of an ancient right, in being prevented from freely making the most profitable use of their fine " eorna" had a good deal of historical justification ; for the making of malt for sale was a Glen trade from the ancient times when kings came there to hunt in their own prehistoric forest. Until he went to reign in England, James VI. came annually with many followers to hunt in the then much reduced belt of that old forest which still stretched across the heads of Glenlochy and Glenlyon to Bendoran and the Coireachan Batha, or Blaek Mount tops, about which the Marchioness of Breadalbane has lately been writing in " Blackwood." The royal hunter and his party were a drouthy lot. John Dow Malster, the Laird of Glenlyon's " maor," or land steward, was busily employed before the hunting season in con- verting the laird's rent in kind " eorna," and the purchased surplus " eorna ' of the tenants, into malt
SOCIAL LIFE AND MORALS. 85
and ale. When royal demand failed and finally ceased, the tenants had to carry the malt to Perth and Stirling to be sold there. James II. had a " pubal," or wooden hunting lodge in the braes of Glenlyon, but it was in the days of his grandson, James IV., who had his court at Insecallan, on the Glenorchy side of the watershed, that the whole district profited most from the annual coming of the King and his followers and many visitors from adjacent Highland districts. With his free command of their language, appreciation of their music, songs, and heroic poetry, and chivalrous if not wholly faultless personal qualities, James IV. was the king for the High- landers, and had his reign not been cut short by the fatal error of rushing to meet his fate at Flodden, the subsequent history of Scotland would certainly have been of a less disturbed and regretful com- plexion. His descendant, the British Solomon, was not a man of noble or fascinating character, but he was affable, homely, shrewd, and accessible, and, as the last king who spoke Gaelic, " Seumas Mac Mairi," was fairly popular in the forest lands. It was through the forest that the potato got into Glenlyon. I was told that the introduction took place when Seumas Mac Mairi was king, and in corroboration manifest signs of old lazy- beds were pointed out. If the introduction took place early in the 17th century, the next century was well advanced before the potato was ranked as a main crop in Glenlyon agriculture.
The " Gray Egyptians," on information from their seniors and personal knowledge, asserted that for the century before the religious revival the inhabitants of the Glen were as temperate drinkers as it was physically and morally wholesome for any
86 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
community to be. In my time that was truly the case, a few ne'er-do-weels excepted. The smuggling had been cried down, but there were three small licensed inns, one at Innervar, one at Innerwick, and one at Bridge of Balgie. The Innerwick one was the provision Old Culdares made for the clans- man who was his officer son's piper, and who brought an Irish wife with him from Ireland. The other two represented alehouses with crofts, which had been in existence for hundreds of years. The whole three disappeared years ago, and now tourists have reason to complain that in the forty miles westward from Fortingall to Tyndrum, and in the cross-country line of twenty miles from Kinloch-Rannoch to Killin, there is not a single licensed house for the entertainment of man or beast. As far as I can see, there never was much general need for the Innervar inn, although it existed as an alehouse from time beyond memory. Until railways and large Inverness and Perth cattle sales changed the whole situation, there was clamant need for the Bridge of Balgie inn, which, till the bridge was built in about 1780, was situated a little further east, near the churchyard ; and for the later inn at Innerwick, which never was an old alehouse, there was general utility justification likewise ; for these two places of public entertainment were placed at the entrance to Larig-an-lochain, and where the eastern and western passes came together by which the stock of the North was driven to Falkirk trysts and other southern markets. The driving time created no small stir in Glenlyon, and all along the old line of cattle tracks and immemorially appointed stopping stations. It helped to make northern and southern Highlanders known to one another.
SOCIAL LIFE AND MORALS. 87
With differences which were generally of a trivial nature, the social and moral life of the Highlands eighty or seventy years ago was very like what I have been describing from information and observa- tion as being the social and moral life of the people of my native Glen at that time. A high ideal of individual responsibility and obligation, reverence for age, family affection, love of children and care in training them up to be good men and women, mutual helpfulness of kinsfolk, and ready sympathy with the afflicted were characteristics of the whole race. Primogeniture backed by entail which was profitable to the eldest sons of landed, families im- posed a self-sacrificing duty in the eldest son of a tenant, whose father happened to die when his children were young. The son had to take the father's place, to keep a roof tree over his brothers' and sisters' and mother's heads, to labour, sweat and struggle, remain celibate until the brothers were launched on their own careers and the sisters were married. Even when the father lived to old age, the eldest son did not escape the bearing of the burdens peculiarly his own. But he generally had his reward in the fealty and patriarchal position he had won by self-sacrifice.
88 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS
CHAPTER XIII.
THE HIGHLAND LANDLORDS.
MAITHEAN NA GAELTACHD* mustered in full array to give George IV. a superabundantly loyal welcome on his visit to Edinburgh in 1822, and, with hardly an exception, the Highland nobles, chiefs, and landlords who put in appearance on the occasion, represented families who owned land and held sway in the same districts 250 years before then, and in not a few instances twice as long as that. Between 1560 and 1822 there had been many broils, for- feitures, and temporary displacements, followed by changing back, first after the Revolution of 1688, and finally by the restorations of their estates to the families who had lost them after Culloden. As a political force and factor for keeping the Highlands separate from the rest of the country, Jacobitism was killed long before the death of Prince Charles. It was persistently assailed by the now dominant Church of Scotland, and undermined by the teaching given in the schools. Chatham's bold scheme of raising the Highland regiments for national defence gave rise to a welding imperial pride which never existed among the Highlanders before, and which from the military quarter co-operated with the spiritual power in changing the situation. From Fontenoy and the capture of Quebec to Waterloo, Highland soldiers had pre-eminently distinguished themselves for valour, discipline, and endurance. They were proud to call themselves Breatunnaich * The aristocracy of the Highlands.
THE HIGHLAND LANDLORDS. 89
(Britons), and to have done good service in defence of the British Empire, and sustained the martial fame of their ancestors. George IV. was not a bad Constitutional King, although as a man he might be said to well deserve all the contempt poured on him by the Whig writers down to Thackeray, from the time he had ceased to rattle dice with Charles James Fox, their belauded, awfully-debauched and debauching leader. George IV. was not personally liked by his Highland people. They had heard stories about his bad conduct to his wife, and of his relations with other women, including, what they could not forgive, other men's wives. They could be and were far more tolerant than their ministers and kirk- sessions about sexual immorality between unmarried sprigs of the upper classes and peasant girls, but they ground their teeth against adultery, which was indeed an exceedingly rare vice among themselves. What they felt due to George IV. was a modified loyalty as the headman of the British Empire. Had George III. come to Scotland after the restoration of the forfeited estates, he would have received from all classes of Highlanders as heart-felt a "ceud mile failt" welcome as was given to his grand-daughter, Queen Victoria, at Blair- Atholl, Taymouth, and Castle Drummond. Farmer George, the "born Briton," through the reports of homely virtues which reached them, obtained a real hold on Highland loyalty. He was the first of his race who did so.
I was present at the Taymouth gathering in 1842, and cannot yet recall without emotion how we all, gentle and simple, old and young, were carried out of ourselves, and thrilled into unity by enthusiastic loyal and chivalrous devotion to our
90 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
young Sovereign Lady. His countrymen, forgetting recent evictions and well-grounded fears of more to come, were exultingly proud of the Marquis of Breadalbane that day. He spent his money and dispensed his hospitality lavishly, created fairyland effects by flags and coloured lamps, and managed the whole procedure connected with an unusual event with organising skill and grand success. But when criticism succeeded enthusiasm it was pointed out that, compared with that of 1822, the impressive muster of 1842 exhibited gaps which showed that in the conflict between the old and the new land systems the new was steadily gaining. Ross-shire, Atholl, and Breadalbane gave excellent illustrations of how incoming feudal magnates established their charter rights, and infused a clannish spirit in 7iative tenants of many surnames. Until the Mac- donalds, Lords of the Isles, and Earls of Ross, were suppressed, the Mackenzies of Kintail were their vassals, and hardly reckoned among their chief vassals. They made the most of their opportunities on the fall of their over-lords to enlarge their influence and possessions, and the Reformation tur- moils later on enabled them to lay appropriating hands on ecclesiastical and old Crown lands in Easter Ross. How did they secure their new pos- sessions ? By planting out as little lairds or chief tenants all the cadets and near kinsmen of the house of Kintail. The Earldom of Atholl — a much smaller affair than the County of Atholl, which embraced all the regions above Dunkeld between the Garry and the Strathearn border — was, from the reign of King Duncan, the father of Malcolm Ceannmor, an appanage of the Royal family. It passed through many owners ere it was bestowed
THE HIGHLAND LANDLORDS. 91
on the half-brother of James II. What did the wise son of the Black Knight of Lome do ? He strengthened the Wolf of Badenoch Stewart element he found in Atholl by bringing in Appin kinsmen of his own and giving them small properties. He also, I think, instituted the policy, which his successors long followed out, of acquiring superiorities by buying or otherwise obtaining estates held of the Crown, and then of selling them on subinfeudation terms. He gave his daughters in marriage to the smaller barons of his district, and by those wise devices, Huntly was prevented from laying grasping hands on forfeited Garth and other lands south of the Grampian boundary. When the present Duke of Atholl's father, then Lord Glenlyon, gave a most hearty Highland welcome to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1842, he was still surrounded by many of the lairds of old lineage who had formed his predecessors' Comhairle Taighe, or provincial court and family council, and were in war times the officers of their host. The estates of these lairds are now, with very few exceptions, owned by proprietors who cannot, however good, as aliens in race, sur- names, traditions and language, fill the places of the vanished families. But in the ducal domains the old kindly relations between the Castle and the farmhouse and cottage, have been throughout the whole long period of mutation and desolation so well maintained, that an old Highlander like myself in visiting Atholl feels himself taken back to the good old days, and is warmed by a glow of admiration which is in contrast to the cold shudder he has to endure in much depopulated and much un-Celticised districts of his native land.
92 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
"BJack Colin of Rome" and his descendants invaded Breadalbane from Glenorchy, much in the same manner as the Kintail Mackenzies invaded the Black Isle and Easter Ross. The Glenorchy Camp- bells began their "bris sios" or eastward progress when, as a whole, the wide regions they were in due time to acquire were King's lands, and monastic lands belonging to the Abbot of Scone, and to James the First's newly introduced and profusely endowed Carthusians of Perth. By public services, Court favour, and purchase, the Glenorchy Camp- bells, who were not only sturdy warriors, but men wise in council, and educated beyond the greater number of their aristocratic contemporaries, first got the management and part-possession of the King's lands, and forthwith commenced to lay the firm and broad foundations of their future principality, by giving out Lawers and Glenlyon to younger sons, and using their influence to give their own followers foothold on the lands of King and monks. To the Glenorchy Campbells, as well as to the Mackenzies of Kintail, the Reformation afforded a grand oppor- tunity for adding Church lands to their already considerable possessions. Infamous Hepburn, the Abbot of Scone and Bishop of Moray, laden with the burden of his sins and fearing coming events, sold his Breadalbane monastic lands at a low price and ready money to Sir Colin Campbell of Glenorchy — the "Cailean Liath" or Gray Colin of local songs and stories — but after Sir Colin's death, his son, Sir Duncan — "Donnachadh Dubh a Churraichd," "Black Duncan of the Cowl," — had, under the revocation law, to pay another purchasing price to King James. I think this same thing happened to the lands of the Carthusians. Donnachadh Dubh and Kenneth of
THE HIGHLAND LANDLORDS. 93
Kintail were contemporaries. They were much alike in policy and character, although Kenneth was illiterate, and Sir Duncan was able to read arid speak in so many languages that he gained the reputation of being a formidable wizard. Both these men were good to their own people and oppressive to their neighbours and rivals. Besides building castles and bridges, making roads, improv- ing on the very good estate regulations issued by James V., King of the Commons, to his Breadalbane tenants, and introducing stallions of two sorts from England to improve the native breeds of Highland horses, Sir Duncan, without wronging his eldest son and heir, Sir Colin, gave out estates to his host of sons, legitimate and illegitimate ; portioned his daughters, legitimate and illegitimate, and by the marriage of his sons and daughters with the sons and daughters of other houses, or even chief tenants, organised a semi-clannish league which once formed should in perpetuity make the heads of it great chiefs. But Sir Duncan was only fourteen years in his grave at Finlarig when Montrose burned the whole of the Glenorchy property from the junction of the Lyon with the Tay to Lismore, without, how- ever, having been able to take any of its places of strength, Taymouth, the Isle of Loch Tay, Finlarig, Isle of Loch Dochart, and the Castle of Glenurchy, etc. A few years later Cromwell's soldiers, under Monk, had seized on all the strengths, but did not, like Montrose, ravage or oppress the country. No military rule could indeed be milder or more justly administered. But then and on two or three other occasions there was no little danger of collapse for the Glenorchy chiefs and their possessions. Yet Restoration, Revolution, and the two eighteenth
94 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
century Jacobite Rebellions, finally left them with widened possessions and well surrounded with satel- lites of their own blood and name, and the other small proprietors connected with them by ties of affinity and custom. Time, of course, had brought about some changes. The Lairds of Lawers, having become Earls of Louden, sold Lawers to the Chief of their house, and Breadalbane knew them no more. Two or three other cadet branches had become extinct. But in 1782 when John Campbell of Carwhin succeeded his kinsman as Fourth Earl of Breadalbane, he found himself surrounded by a large provincial court or assembly of landed kinsmen and allies, and his tenant communities, in winter-towns and shealings, living under the land settlement system of James, which Black Sir Duncan had revived and vastly improved. This Fourth Earl was a truly kindly and thoroughly Highland-hearted man, and a patriot who raised three fencible regi- ments during the war with France. He resided very constantly at Taymouth, was a Whig and a Presbyterian, and spent much money on wood- planting and other improvements. He was made a Marquis in 1831. During his longer than half-a- century of sway he saw, as if stricken by a strange fatality, his house council satellites diminishing rapidly to the vanishing point. Although he kept a hospitable house, was a free hand giver, and added to and improved his vast property, from living so much at home among his people he accumulated much wealth, which he divided among his three children, to wit, his son and successor, and his two daughters, Lady Elizabeth Pringle and the Duchess of Buckingham. He was not, like his son, a Manchester-school political-economist, and in sheer
THE HIGHLAND LANDLORDS. 95
kind - heartedness he committed the blunder of making holdings, which the changed conditions of farming and the contracting value of domestic industries liad made already too small, more con- gested still by finding "rooms'7 for such of his fencible men as were not the eldest sons of tenants. Had the circle of smaller lairds attached to his house not ceased before then to exercise the func- tions of informal yet very practical family council, he would surely have been advised by them to leave Black Duncan's land-settlement alone, or if he meddled with it at all, as opportunities offered to increase instead of diminishing the size of the hold- ings. The old Marquis lived and died as a great and much-honoured Highland magnate. His son was in personal conduct as good a man as his father, and admittedly the abler man of the two, but he never was the man for Gaeldom. In 1842 he made a brave and, for the moment, a successful show of being that man, and years afterwards, at the first review of Volunteers in Edinburgh, he did, at the head of his Breadalbaue Volunteers, appear to be a great Chief to people who did not know what an isolated magnate lie was in his own country, and how he had alienated the affections of his own folk. It was no fault of his, indeed, that veiy few — four or five at most— representatives of the thirty or forty cadet lairds of his house, and affinity lairds of other surnames who surrounded his father in 1782, were about him to receive the Queen in 1842. The dis- appearance of these landed families, some by natural extinction, and some by having got into money troubles which compelled selling out, may, however, be taken to account in some measure for the line of estate management he deliberately adopted. He be-
96 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
*
lieved in the new political economy principles, and consistently carried them out until he died a lonely man and sad, although rich beyond the dream of ordinary avarice, at Lausanne in 1862.
To the heads of noble houses, the small lairds of their name and lineage, and those who were con- nected with them by affinity or feudal ties, were bodyguards or crios-leine (literally shirt girdles). They were then the connecting links with the common people, and their advisers in the matters which concerned the well-being of the whole com- munity within the bounds of their lords' and their own possessions. The magnate only gained mere isolation when lie acquired estates by honest purchase of small estates which old bodyguard adherents of his family found themselves compelled to sell. Factors could not, and those of them who could, would not, inform him so fully about matters he ought to know, as the lairds who were in close touch with the people, spoke their language, and thoroughly understood their circumstances and feelings. On the other hand the magnates used their influence and patronage to open careers in the Army, Navy, and Civil Service, and in the Church, and legal and medical professions, to the sons of the small lairds, and the sons of their own tenants, crofters, and cottars. The unruly spirits among the sons of the mansion-houses, who while sowing their early wild oats at home, caused vexation to parents and strict ecclesiastical disciplinarians, in many instances illustrated the truth of Burns's lines : " Yet oft a ragged cout's been known To mak' a noble aiver,"
by blossoming out into sturdy warriors and pioneers of empire abroad, or by turning over new leaves
THE HIGHLAND LANDLORDS. 97
at home, and setting themselves resolutely and doucely to useful pursuits. The lairds and their families made life in the country attractive to the magnates and their families by furnishing them with a far less pleasure-jaded society than they were accustomed to in London. The lairds were the acting Justices of the Peace, and in some large parts of the Highlands, as far as the common people were concerned, almost the sole representatives of civil power, while ministers and kirk sessions repre- sented the spiritual power. For fifty years after the restoration of the forfeited estates these two powers, working amicably together, preserved good order at small cost, and reduced crimes which had to be dealt with by Sheriff and Assize Courts to a minimum. Most of the then Highland lairds were Presbyterians, and not a few of them elders of the Church of Scotland. Only a few old Jacobite families stuck to Episcopalianism as the pathetic badge of a lost cause. Highland nobles, who were Church of England people in England, when at home in their Highland castles worshipped con- tentedly in canopied pews in their parish churches. Political and caste causes which, after the passing of the Reform Bill, spoiled the previous harmony by degrees, had yet to arise, and, practically, Highland depopulation and the annual invasion of English sportsmen and buying out of Highland proprietors had almost yet to begin. Despite the invasion of Lowland sheep, shepherds and renters of shealing grazings, and disforested old deer forests, the general situation to the superficial observer remained unchanged, say up to 1832.
98 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
CHAPTER XIV.
FRANCIE MOR MAC AN ABA.
THIS last Chief of the Macnabs, who possessed what fragment of the patrimony of his ancestors had escaped the vengeance of Robert Bruce, and sub- sequent forfeitures and disasters, died twelve years before I was born, and his property was sold at highest market value a few years after his death to his old and very helpful friend, the Earl of Bread- albane, who had at a former crisis in his financial affairs saved him by procuring a commission for him as major in the Perthshire and Local Militia, and later on in the Breadalbane Volunteers. Long after his death the country rang with stories of his doings and sayings. He was so eccentric that he was a law to himself. His word was his bond, but it was only the word on his honour which could really bind him, while he looked upon a written obligation as a thing to be discharged when it suited his con- venience. He was tall, strong, handsome, and brave to excess, but withal too good-natured to be quarrelsome. He had his moral line of prohibition, but he looked on unmarried peasant girls as the natural prey or prizes of long descent chiefs like himself. He never married, but was the father of a baker's dozen of children. Rumour magnified the number of tht-.m so generously that a society lady in Edinburgh plurnply asked him if it was true that he had twenty-six children. The answer she got was " Madam, T never could count aboon twenty-five."
FRANCIE MOR MAC AN ABA. 99
That was mere banter, but as Janet, his house- keeper, bore eight children to him, and he had five or more by different servant girls before Janet took command of himself and his house, he was fairly well supplied with offspring. In his early roving days he was a thorn in the flesh to his worthy father, John Macnab of Bovain, and to the scholarly and sensitively religious minister of Kill in, the Rev. James Stewart, who translated the New Testament and a good portion of the Old Testament into the Gaelic of the Highlands. Father and minister, the one with his paternal lectures and the other with his Church censures, were such plagues to him that he bought the farm of Cruigruie, in Balquhidder, and went to live there. He paid an instalment of the price by money which had come to him pro- bably from his grandmother, but he never completed the purchase. When his father died a lad was sent over the hill to tell him the news, which he received with gladness, being then botli without credit and money. As reported to me by Balquhidder men, these were the words which passed between him and the messenger, who came to him bonnet in hand outside the house and said, " Mhic an Aba, tha ur n-athair marbh."
Macnab — "Mata, 'ille, 's math do naigheachd. So dhuit tri sgilean. Rach a stigh's gheibh thu biadh's deoch."
Messenger — "Macuab, your father is dead."
Macnab — " Well lad, good is your news. Here's threepence for you. Go in and you'll get food and drink."
The three pennies were no doubt all the coins he had in his pocket then, for he was a liberal giver when he had anything to give. When he succeeded
100 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
to his patrimony and brought Janet to be his house- keeper at Kinnell, he settled down to a life of comparative decency. His father provided for the proper bringing-up of the early crop of illegitimate grandchildren. He provided fairly well for Janet's brood himself. The daughters married honest countrymen and made good wives to them. Janet's two sons, who did not marry, were well provided "for by a property in Callander which their father bought for them at a low price, and promptly paid for, and which turned out to be a profitable invest- ment. He was ready enough to admit paternity in every case of misconduct, but to profess penitence and to promise amendment was more than he could be induced to do. When he settled down in regular concubinage with Janet, he paid his "umhla" or fine to the poor box, got respectable people to hold his children for baptism, and was otherwise let off by more lax ministers than the first he had to deal with, as a half-reformed reprobate. His good quali- ties made him popular, and were supposed to out- balance his one notorious and incorrigible immorality. In another matter he took a slantendicular view of duty. He was a Justice of the Peace and a friend and patron of the smugglers. This friendship and sympathy suffered no interruption during the few years in which he was himself a licensed pro- ducer of whisky. It was shortly before 1796 that he set up a small distillery at Killin on his own side of the river Dochart. That speculation did not pay and had soon to be dropped. When he was residing in Balquidder, a smuggler whom he had befriended came to him in much distress to announce that two barrels full of whisky, which he had hidden in the hills till he could get them conveyed southward for
FRANCIE MOR MAC AN ABA. 101
sale, had been discovered by revenue men, who were then taking them with great difficulty (as they had no horses) down to the roadway, whence they were to be carried to Callander to be condemned. "Have they found out that the barrels belong to you?" p.sked Macnab. "No doubt," replied the man, " their base informant knew and told that they were mine." " You are a law-breaking rascal, and it would only be like you if you, with your accomplices, followed them to the place on the way where the revenue men, arriving late and tired, will certainly stop to rest, eat, and drink, and if, while they are doing so, you and the other fellows trans- ferred under cloud of night the whisky into new barrels, and filled the old ones with water — Lord ! if your trick succeeded what a joke it would be when the amazed revenue men, on being called upon to prove they had really seized smuggled whisky, found there was nothing of whisky about them except an old smell!!" The plan suggested was, with some help from the innkeeper of the half-way house of entertainment, easily carried out. The revenue men were covered with ridicule, for they could not swear that the barrels contained whisky when they had seized them, and whatever they might suspect regarding the transfer, they were far from anxious to confess how careless their guardianship had been.
Macnab kept his Volunteer regiment, under ex- cellent discipline, not so much by military severity as by terrible scoldings in barbed Gaelic. He was ordered to take his men to Stirling, and he took care that there should be no indiscretions by the way, as he was bent on making his regiment a model of military propriety. They were close on
102 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
Stirling, and Macnab, looking like an old hera of romance, was riding in state at the head of his men, swollen with pride in their good conduct, splendid marching, and kilted and plaided picturesque appearance, when word came to him from the rear that gangers were trying to stop the waggons to search for smuggled whisky, which, they said, they had learned was concealed among the baggage. A wrathful burst of surprise and indignation proved that oji this occasion the smugglers had abused Macriab's confidence. Yet for all that he would do his best to cover their misconduct. He ordered the regiment to halt, and rode back to the rear, taking with him a sergeant and a dozen men. On coming to the waggons he found his quartermaster and the chief of the would-be searchers in hot altercation. He silenced the former by a wave of his hand, and turning to the latter, asked, " My pretty man, who are you and your people ? And what do you want ? " The latter explained that he was a revenue officer, and that on information received he wanted to search the waggons for smuggled whisky. " Well," replied Macnab, " the information you declare you have received has been kept from my knowledge, and without proof I'll not believe it. But produce your warrant and you may search away." The other, taken aback, said he had had no time to procure a warrant. " Not time to procure a war- rant ? How dare you stop the King s waggons on the King's highway ? Who are you ? Show your commission." He acknowledged that he had not his commission with him. " No search warrant, no commission to be shown ? How do I know that you are not impostors, thieves, and robbers ? " Then turning to the sergeant and his men, he said, "Lads,
FRANCIE MOR MAC AN ABA. 103
this is a serious matter. Load with ball." The, revenue men scampered off as fast as they could, thankful to escape with their lives. Then, reverting to Gaelic, Macnab first swore at the waggon men for abusing his confidence, and then told them to drive into Stirling as fast as if the deil were chasing them, and if they had whisky among the baggage, to get it out, and out of sight, before the revenue men could come on them with a search warrant. His orders were carried out, and when the search was made in Stirling nothing seizable vras discovered.
Macnab was punctilious about being properly addressed. No mistake was ever made in Gaelic. Everybody addressed him as Mhic an Aba, "Son of the Abbot." But those who did not know Gaelic and Highland rules of precedence often made him angry by calling him "Mr Macnab." He could not bear that indignity, although he took no offence at all if he was called Laird of Macnab. One day as he was sitting in an upper room which had its windows open, in his house at Kinnell, he heard the bell of the front door below ring, and when Janet appeared, a stranger asked : "Is Mr Macnab at home ? " The Chief, resenting the unconscious in- sult to his dignity, rushed to the open window of his room above, thrust out his head and roared like a bull of Bashan, " There is nae Mister Macnab here. There are mony Mister Macnabs, but deil tak' me if there is but ae Macnab."
Macnab's always precarious financial business was managed by the Perth bank, where the officials, by knowing his peculiarities and how to humour him, always got back the money lent to him with full interest. Macnab never thought that it was incuin-
104 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
bent 011 him to pay upon the dates mentioned in his bills. But by mischance one of his bills fell into the hands of a Stirling bank agent, who, when no reply was made to his note asking payment without delay, resorted to legal proceedings, which Macnab ignored, and having got decree against him the agent sent a Sheriff-officer and concurrent to Kihnell to poind goods and chattels, unless the debt with interest and expenses should be instantly paid. Macnab knew that these limbs of the law were coming forth- with to pounce on him, so he thought it best to pay at once a long visit to Taymouth, where he was always welcome, and to leave Janet to deal with the visitors. When he was away they came late in the evening. They were footsore, weary, hungry, and thirsty. When they told their errand, Janet assured them that the Laird had gold in his kist, and would readily pay them when he got back from visiting his friends, Lord and Lady Breadalbane, at Tay- mouth, which return, she hoped, would take place the next day. They got plenty to eat and drink, were elated with the hope of obtaining full payment promptly, and it was in a jubilant frame of mind that they followed Janet to the ground -floor room in which they were to sleep. The moon was shining bright ; the bed was at the room's further end ; while the window, which was near the door, was open ; and Janet, while bidding them good-night, and holding the door half-open, advised them to shut the window. The one who went to do her bidding looked out, and seeing the figure of a man hanging to a tree outside, emitted a cry of consternation which drew his companion to his side. " What is that horrid thing ? " they asked in one breath. " Oh," replied Janet, " that is only a poor body who
FRANCIE MOR MAC AN ABA. 105
has been hanged out of hand by the Laird, because he came bothering about the payment of a miserable debt." Having given her explanation, Janet quickly withdrew, and closed and locked the heavy door behind her. The trembling limbs of the law, believ- ing Janet's tale, and fearing a similar fate for bothering the formidable Macnab about a debt, made their escape through the unbarred window and got far beyond the Breadalbane march before the sun rose. What so thoroughly frightened them were old clothes stuffed with straw and a round bag filled with chaff to represent a human head. Wher- ever he got the money — perhaps it was lent to him at Taymouth — this particular debt was paid without further delay, and nothing worse than fun sprang out of Janet's trickery.
All classes of his countrymen agreed in the opinion variously expressed that Francie Mor Mac an Aba was the most remarkable anachronism that could be found in the orderly-disposed Highlands of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. His faults were counter- balanced by many good qualities. In grain he was noble and chivalrous. He made no enemies. He was a perpetual source of amusement and eccentric surprises. When in good old age he was buried with his ancestors in romantic Innis Buidhe, he had sincere mourners there, and thousands who were not there said with a sigh, "We shall never see his like again." His lineage probably went back to William the Lion's Abbot of Glendochart ; and an ancestor of his, to the detriment of his descendants, for the most of his lands was taken from him to endow the new priory of Strathfillan, fought along with the Lome Chief against Bruce at Dalrigh, where the future
106 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
hero of Bannockburn narrowly escaped death, or a capture which would end in death to him and to the independence of Scotland. Francie succeeded to a small estate which was encumbered by some family charges in favour of junior members of his father's family. At his death Francie's estate was quite hopelessly insolvent. It had, therefore, to be sold, and as the next legitimate heir, Erchie'n Doctair, could not re-purchase it, the Earl of Breadalbane became the purchaser. Thus the candle of an old lineage was removed from the place which had been lighted by it for four or five centuries.
CHAPTER XV.
DISAPPEARANCE OF OLD LANDED FAMILIES- MUCH REGRETTED.
IT is a far cry from Glenlyon to Glengarry, and there never had been race or historical connections, or even much direct communication between the two places ; yet there was deep and general sorrow in Glenlyon when the debt-burdened property of the Macdonells had to be sold, and an English lord bought the chief part of it — which, however, he afterwards resold to a worthy Scotsman, "although" —this is how the Highlanders qualified their praise of him — "he had the misfortune to be a Lowlander." When the landless Chief was making his prepara- tions for emigrating to Australia, with a portion of his people, his proceedings were watched with exceeding interest — every drover, pedlar, and travel- ling tinker or beggar from the north being closely questioned about him. On his departure, he and
THE OLD LANDED FAMILIES. 107
his party had the good wishes of all their Celtic countrymen. The news of their arrival in Australia and the welcome they got there excited hopes of success at home, which, while not totally realised, were not totally disappointed. Glengarry's emigra- tion, with wooden huts and tents ready to be put up on landing, and with a company of clansfolk, caused Highland emigrants, including a batch from Glenlyon, to go to Australia instead of taking the customary route to Canada, or the United States.
The collapse of the Glengarry house was throughout all the Highlands felt to be a whole race calamity. The Seaforth earls, Chiefs of the Mackenzies, had passed away a little earlier, and the remnant of their property which was not sold went to the heir by the spindle side, who, although he claimed to do so, could riot on clan principles inherit the chiefship. But Ross-shire was not left without many important landed proprietors of the house of Kintail. There was no such compensation in regard to the disappearance of the Macdonells, a main branch of the Somerled tree from Glengarry. That disappearance was like the fall of a fixed star from the Celtic firmament. It turned war-songs and proud piobaireachd into hollow mockeries or pathetic laments, and took the pith out of the oral traditions. The Huntly Seton-Gordons, who, as Earls of Huntly and Dukes of Gordon, figure so largely in the history of Scotland from 1 400 down- wards, had wide possessions in the Highlands, and succeeded through marriage to give one of their off-shoots the Earldom of Sutherland. Able and ambitious as these Seton-Gordons were, and anxious as they were at times to act as Highland chiefs, and readily as they were taken for such at Court and
108 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
in the Lowlands, they never in Highland opinion levelled themselves up to equality with a Mac- donell of Glengarry, or a Cameron of Lochiel, or even a Keppoch Chief, who was only their tenant. The Duke of Gordon who died in 1836 was genuinely popular in the Highlands, for had he not by his mother's effective if unscrupulous method of recruiting raised the glorious 92nd or Gordon High- landers ? It was the minister of Fortingall's son, Sir .Robert Macara, who commanded that regiment when Napoleon escaped from Elba, and he fell as a noble warrior should fall, resisting Ney's charge at Quatre Bras. If not the fighting, the Duke of Gordon was the ornamental colonel of the 92nd, and on it he spent much care and money. This kindly man and generous landlord was the last of his race. Our Glenlyon men of age, who were wise and deep in traditional lore, while speaking very kindly of the last Duke of Gordon, did not regret his being the last, seeing that his heir and successor was a Stuart, and bar-sinister descendant of Charles II. Later on their calmness was disturbed by the sale to an Englishman of the lordship of Lochaber, and Inverlochy Castle and the estate attached to it. Transfers of properties by sales or devolution on female line heirs who were strangers and had resi- dences elsewhere, furnished our aged sages of all surnames with causes of mourning and with auguries of evil to come. They were all admirers of the state of peace which was established throughout the Highlands within twenty years after Culloden. As soon as the forfeited estates were restored they thought good rule could be carried on for ever by Church and landlords working together in harmony, and truly between 1780 and 1830 that co-operation
THE OLD LANDED FAMILIES. 109
of the spiritual and secular powers was strongly in evidence and produced excellent results. But in course of time the lairds or smaller barons, who were the essential links for connecting the high aristocracy with the classes below, displayed inability to keep their footing. Main lines died out and side line successors had neither their knowledge nor sympa- thies. Other most popular families of small estates failed to live within their incomes, and their estates, on coming to be sold, were bought by strangers who might do temporary good by spending money on improvements, but who could not, in one generation at least, be such leaders of the people on their land as their impoverished predecessors had been. I question if any landowner in the southern Highlands could make out a longer claim for his own and his ancestors' possession of the same lands than Francie Mor Mac an Aba. But most of the lairds who were his contemporaries and neighbours or acquaintances, had two centuries of possessory history and had consequently acquired the position »f natural leaders. This was not a position which in old Highland days could be gained in one generation by strangers. There was a curious form of stability in the seemingly hopeless instability of the times of ancient feuds, broils, rebellions and forfeitures ; for the next up- set usually resettled what the previous one had unsettled.
110 BEMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
CHAPTER XVI.
PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS.
"THE Children of the Gael " — as they loved to call themselves — had, from the days of their prehistoric wanderings, plenty of race patriotism and conquer- ing ambition. They miserably lacked the blessed stolidity which anchored Saxons and other less imaginative races in the places which they had won. Stability, appropriation of other people's inventions and ideas, and the power of building up empires did not belong to world-teachers like the ancient Greeks, nor to world-roamers like the ancient Celtic swarms. But lost opportunities in the past haunted and still haunt the minds of the descendants of both the world-teachers and the world-roamers.
It was only when they proudly learned, as soldiers of the Empire, to call themselves Britons, that Imperial patriotism took a strong and lasting hold on the Children of the Gael. The last rebellion of sectional patriotism and politics was the rebellion of 1745, which, while far more picturesque and dramatic, was far less spontaneous and united than the rebellion of 1715. After Culloden, down to the passing of the Eeform Bill of 1832, the Highland people left politics to their nobles, chiefs, and land- lords. Paper votes were made by portioning out superiorities generally on easy terms of revocation, by the manipulating magnates. So " barons" grew and decayed like mushrooms ; the power of the magnates appeared to be established on sure and
PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS. 1 1 1
lasting foundations ; and the whole commonalit contentedly looked on, especially after the restora- tion of the forfeited estates, thankful to enjoy peace under the combined rule of the Church and the landowners. They had cause for thankfulness. The combined rule was the best and cheapest that they could obtain, or, if they obtained, that they could use with advantage.
Outside the burghs, of which we had scarcely any in the southern Highlands, the Reform Bill agitation made little noise in Gaeldom. Whenever a little stir got up it was the work of outsiders, who, like our Glenlyon celebrity, the Father of Burgh Reform, had become reformers in Edinburgh and other towns, and wished to get Highlanders to follow their lead. When the bill was passed into law, the newly enfranchised tenants qualified by a £50 rent were not unduly elated by their political importance, for all but a very few left the registra- tion of their claims to proprietors and their agents, who forthwith proceeded to act on the assumption that the tenant-electors would follow their lead, as in hosting and hunting did their fathers in bygone times. Landlord influence, through harmonious co- operation with the national Church, had wonderfully recovered from the blow inflicted on it by the abolition of heritable jurisdictions and the restriction or sweeping away of various old feudal privileges of a vexatious kind. Why should not the £50 rent electors buttress landlord influence even better than the former " paper- vote " barons did ? Highland lords and lairds, who lived pretty constantly on their properties, were in close touch with their people, and usually worshipped in the same churches with them. Their people looked upon such as
112 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
their natural leaders in politics, and followed them willingly without the least undue compulsion. Radicalism in the Highlands only grew rank when landlord compulsion by agents of non-resident landlords took the place of the former natural and kindly leadership.
From Dunkeld to the border of Argyll the people on the land watered by the Tay and its affluents had long been accustomed to form two political groups — the Tory group round the family of Atholl, and the Whig group round the family of Breadal- bane. Excepting Roro, belonging to the Earls of Breadalbane, all Glenlyon had been under Atholl superiority since the sale of the barony by Robert Campbell, of the unhappy massacre of Glencoe notoriety, to the Marquis of Atholl shortly before the Revolution of 1688. But when the £50 rent voters on the estate of Culdares were, in the election immediately following the passing of the Reform Bill, called upon to exercise their right, they asserted their independence by voting for the Whig candidate. That candidate was the heir of Breadalbane, who, when his father was created a Marquis in 1831, dropped his former title of Lord Glenorchy, and took that of Earl of Ormelie, which he would not have done had he consulted the Breadalbane people, who liked the title he dropped and superstitiously disliked the one he had assumed, because it was borne by Duncan, the eldest son of the first Earl, who, on account of imbecility, was displaced in the succession by his next brother, John. I was much too young when that first election after the passing of the Reform Bill took place to care for or under- stand political questions. But I well remember the fuss and discussions it gave rise to among the newly
PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS. 113
enfranchised farmers on the estate of Culdares. What they did in the end was to vote for Lord Ormelie, not because of his political opinions but because he was his father's son — " Mac an duine fhiachail sin, tha sios an Caisteal Bhealaich," " Son of the worthy man who is east of us in Taymouth Castle." Lord Ormelie was triumphantly returned for Perthshire, but as his father died in 1834, he soon passed from the House of Commons into the House of Lords.
In 1822 Lord Ormelie married Eliza, daughter of Mr George Baillie of Jerviswood. It was at Auchmore, near Killin, that the new member of Parliament for Perthshire and his lady chiefly resided for the first ten years of their married life. And although, to the great regret of the people and no doubt their own, they had no children, their married life, in other respects, was all that such a life should be. They were in these Auchmore days a very popular pair, and they deserved popularity. The husband's personal character commanded respect even in the dark years to come when, as a landlord, he had lost all his early popularity, and his amiable lady remained popular till her death in 1861. Re- joicing gatherings and feastings to celebrate the Whig victory in Perthshire were held in various parts of the country. At Killin, near Lord Ormelie's residence, a big tent was run up close to the hotel, where many hundreds were to dine together and listen to speeches after feasting. In half-witted Willie Chalum, Killin possessed a fool of its own who kept the village and neighbourhood entertained by his sayings and doings, but who, from his prying habits and babbling tongue, could be a plague to those who had anything to conceal. Willie watched
8
114 REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS.
the setting up of the pavilion tent for the festivity, and, on the day appointed for the meeting, when those entrusted with the arrangements were busy laying the tables and fixing flags and decorations, he often stepped inside and was often turned out, but finally got in and out unobserved, with some- thing under his " ciotag," or short cloak. This something was a suckling pig roasted whole and now of course cold, which as a garlanded central ornament was to 1'ecall symbolically the Campbell tale of lineage and to represent the clan crest —
Ceaun na muicc fiadhaich
A mharbh Diarmad 's a choill' udlaidh.
Decorated, spiced, cold-roasted pigling made Willie's mouth water. He could not resist the temptation of lifting it and running off with it. He got out of the pavilion unobserved, but outside he roused suspicions by running too fast to the bank of the river. He was soon followed. The weather had been hot for some time, and now suddenly, when Willie was being followed, a thunderstorm broke over Killin. He got into a snug place, under rock and tree shelter, with the pursuers, whom he did not notice, hard at his heels, when the second flash and crash came. Willie, who was preparing to dine, looked up at the sky and spoke out loud as if protesting that it was much ado about nothing — " Ubh-ubha ; Nach e sin an stairirich mhor airson uircean firionn muice ?" " Oo-oo ; Is that not the great uproar on account of the suckling son of a pig ?" And poor Willie was deprived of his ex- pected dinner.
The Fortingall blacksmith, George Drysdale, had no vote, but he had a tongue, which he used freely on behalf of Lord Ormelie, and against his opponent,
PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS. 115
General Sir George Murray, Wellington's old mili- tary secretary, during the election contest. George had been a soldier himself, and the General he wor- shipped above all others was Thomas Graham of Balgowan, Lord Lyndoch. George " came up the water" to Fortingall from the Lowland border, and I think it probable