SLIGACHAN.
We wanted to see the Cuchullins and the much-talked-about Loch Coruisk. But here we found that we were again on the tourist route from which we had gone so far astray. There was not a room to be had in the inn. It was full of immaculately dressed young ladies and young Oxford men, all with their knickerbockers at the same degree of bagginess, their stockings turned down at the same angle. We might have thought that the landlady objected to tramps when the company was so elegant, had she not offered to put us up in the drawing-room and found places for us at the table-d'hôte luncheon. The talk was all of hotels and lochs and glens and travels. How long have you been in Skye? Is this your first visit? Did you come by Loch Maree? At what hotel did you stay in Oban? But there was not a word about cottages; for there is nothing in Sligachan, or near it, as far as we could see, but this swell hotel, which seemed very good.
Beds in the drawing-room meant to be at the mercy of the company. We did not hesitate. And still the moors stretched out before us. No one who has not tramped in Skye can imagine its dreariness. In Portree, a miniature Oban, we lost all courage. We might have gone back to Loch Coruisk. We might have tramped to take a nearer view of the Old Man of Storr, which we had already seen in the distance. We might have walked to Armadale, or steamed to Strome Ferry. There were, in fact, many things we could and should have done; but we had seen enough of the miserable life in the islands—those great deserts, with but here and there a lovely oasis for the man of wealth. Our walks had been long; we were tired physically and sick mentally.
And so, early one morning, we took the boat at Portree and steamed back to the main-land; past Raasay, where Dr. Johnson stayed, and where there was a big house with beautiful green lawn and fine woods; past Glenelg, where we should have landed to follow the Doctor's route, but the prospect of a thirty miles' walk to reach the nearest inn made cowards of us; past Armadale, now as when Pennant saw it, "a seat, beautifully wooded, gracing most unexpectedly this almost treeless tract;" past one island of hills after another; and thus into the Sound of Mull, to get a glimpse of Tobermory in sunshine. It was a lovely day; sea and sky and far islands blue, the water like glass; though, before it had come to an end, we had twice fled to the cabin from heavy showers. There were many sight-seers on board, and we could but wonder why. The women read novels, the men went to sleep. But they had done their duty—they had been to Scotland for the holidays; they had probably seen the Quiraing and Dunvegan. But they had not gone our way. The coach roads are those from which the least misery is visible.
That evening Oban did its best for us. The sun went down in red fire beyond Mull's now purpling hills. And as the burning after-glow cooled into the quiet twilight, we looked for the last time on the island of Mull. It seemed in its new beauty to have found peace and rest. May this seeming have become reality before we again set foot on Hebridean shores!
Note.—The Crofters' Act of 1886 was supposed to do away with the crofters' wrongs. As yet it has accomplished little. In some cases the Commissioners appointed for the purpose have lowered the extortionate rents which crofters have been starving for years to pay. Now that agitation in the islands has made it absolutely necessary that something should be done for the people, in one or two test cases, those clauses of the act which prevent landlords evicting tenants at their own pleasure have been enforced. Beyond this the condition of the people is absolutely no better than it was before the act was passed. They have not enough land to support them, and when they appeal for more, their landlord answers, as Lady Matheson has just answered her small tenants in the Lewis, "The land is mine; you have nothing to do with it." Nothing has been done for the cotters who have no land at all; nothing for fishermen, who are, if possible, worse off at the end of the fishing season than they were at the beginning. The money appropriated for the building of piers and harbors and the purchase of boats has not as yet been put to its proper use.
TO THE EAST COAST, AND BACK AGAIN.
One always hears of Highland scenery at its best; one usually sees it at its worst. We found the trip from Oban to Inverness up the Caledonian Canal as tedious as it is said to be charming. The day was gray and misty and rainy. In the first boat we sat in the cabin, in the second under an awning. Occasionally we went on deck to look for the sights of the journey.
As we steamed up Loch Linne a Scotchman pointed out Ben-Nevis.
"Well," said J——, critically, "if you were to put a top on it, it might make a fairly decent mountain."
After that we were left to find the sights for ourselves.
The day would have been unbearably dull but for the exertions of a Mr. Macdonell. He was, I am as ashamed to say as he seemed to be, our fellow-countryman. He did not look in the least like an American, nor like an Englishman, though his ulster, coat, trousers, collar, necktie, gloves, and hat were all so English. He was a middle-aged man, handsome, and gentlemanly enough until he began to talk. At the very start he told everybody on board in general and each individual in particular that he was a Macdonell. As all the people about here are Macdonells, no one was startled. The name in these parts is rather more common than, and about as distinguished as, Smith in the Directory.
"I'm a Macdonell," he said, "and I'm proud of it. It's a great clan. No matter what our nationality may be now, sir, we're all Macdonells still. I'll tell you the way we do in our clan. Not long ago one of the Macdonells of Lochaber was married. He was not very rich—he had about £12,000 a year perhaps—and the Macdonells thought it would be a nice thing to give him a present of money from Macdonells all over the world. There was not a Macdonell who did not respond. I was in Melbourne at the time, and I was proud to give my guinea. Now, how different it was with Grant, that man who was President of the United States. The clan Grant tried to do the same thing when one of their chief's family was married, and the factor sent to this Grant, and said they would be very proud and had no doubt he would be very glad to contribute to this happy occasion in the old clan. And what do you think he answered? He indorsed on the letter sent him—I saw it myself—that he was not one of the tenantry, and therefore would not contribute. That shows what a snob he was. But it's very different with the Macdonells. I'll tell you what happened to me the other day near Banavie. I lost one of my gloves; they were driving gloves—expensive gloves, you know. I gave the odd one to the driver, and said if he could find the other he would have a pair. The next day he came to me with both gloves. 'Sir,' he said, 'I cannot keep them; I too am a Macdonell!' I gave him the other glove and a guinea. That shows the fine clannish feeling."
We have heard that there is a proverb about fools and Americans.
Mr. Macdonell stood on the upper deck to look towards the country of the Macdonells, which he could not see through the mist. He took out his guide-book and read poetry and facts about his clan, to two American girls, until, quite audibly, they pronounced it all stuff and him a bore. He praised the Macdonell chiefs to Englishmen until they laughed almost in his face. "The Duke of New York," they called him before evening. He sang the praises of his Macdonell land to any one who would listen. "I like it better than Switzerland or our own country," he said; "I'm coming back next year to rent a shooting-place. But the trouble is the people here don't like us. It's the fault of men like Carnegie. He comes and gives them £20,000 for a library. And then what does he do? He makes a speech against their queen. It's shocking. It's atrocious."
I wonder why Americans, as soon as they borrow the Englishman's clothes, must add his worst traits to their own faults. "That kind of American," a Londoner on board said to us, "has all the arrogance and insolence of a lord combined with the ignorance and snobbishness of a cad." He was right. Of all the men who rent the great deer forests of Scotland, none are such tyrants as the American millionaires who come over, as Mr. Macdonell probably will next summer, for the shooting. More than one Scotchman we met told us so plainly. There is a famous case where the cruelty of an American sportsman, who plays the laird in the Highlands, so far outdid that of the real laird that the latter came forward to defend his people against it! Now that the war of emancipation is being fought from one end of Great Britain to the other, it is to our shame that there are Americans who uphold the oppressors. One might think we struggled for freedom at home only to strive against it abroad. Mrs. Stowe could write "Uncle Tom's Cabin" on behalf of slaves in the United States; in Great Britain she saw only the nobility and benevolence of the slave-driver. From the plantations of the South there never rose such a cry of sorrow and despair as that which rang through the glens and straths of Sutherland when men were driven to the sea to make room for sheep. And yet to Mrs. Stowe this inhuman chase was but a sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggle of advancing civilization, and elevating in a few years a whole community to a point of education and material prosperity which, unassisted, they might never have attained. You might as well call the slavery of negroes a sublime instance of the power of traders to shorten the natural course of human development, since if left to themselves the blacks could not have advanced beyond the savage state in which they were found. I fear the American love for a lord is not exaggerated, if even Mrs. Stowe could be blinded by it.
There was little to break the monotony of the journey except the Macdonells. "If the sun only shone," Mrs. Macdonell explained, "there would be the lights and shadows." As it was, however, water and sky and shores were of uniform grayness. Now and then we passed the ruins of an old castle. At a place whose name I have forgotten the boat stopped that everybody might walk a mile or more to see a water-fall. It may have been our loss that we did not go with the rest; certainly a party of Frenchmen on their return declared it une cascade vraiment charmante. At Fort Augustus the boat was three-quarters of an hour getting through the locks, and in the mean time enterprising tourists climbed the tower of the new Benedictine monastery, which stands where was once the old fort. We went instead to the telegraph office, and secured a room in Inverness, and gave the landlord an order for the letters we hoped were waiting for us at the bank. Young Benedictines in black gowns, like students of the Propaganda on the Pincian, were walking out two by two.
These were the day's excitements.
As we neared Inverness, Mr. Macdonell was again on deck. "I always go to the Caledonian Hotel in Inverness," he told us. "What I like is to stay at the best hotels, where I meet the society of England and Scotland—the real society. There's the Royal Hotel in Edinburgh; it suits me because you are sure to find it full of good English and Scotch society. I must always have the best society. Besides, they're very good hotels, both of them. In our country we boast of the products of the Chesapeake; but we have nothing so delicious, nothing so delicate, as the fresh herring they will serve you for breakfast at the Caledonian."
As we drove from the boat to