This poet of course rather shirks the fact that the clansmen, if “happy,” “kindly,” and so forth, were like to be so at the expense of other “revering” clansmen and their ineffectually “protecting head.” At all events, they have little reverence left for “stranger lords.”
The resentful men who once made our plaided and plumed array have passed rather into the ranks of labour in Glasgow, London, and other large towns. Not a few of them indeed have gone into sea-service, as shown by the Royal Naval Reserve at Stornoway. Many have sought better fortunes in Australia, New Zealand, all over the world. I was at school with a Highland laird’s sons, who for years went kenspeckle, like Lord Brougham, in a succession of shepherd’s-plaid nether garments off the same web, sent home from the plains of Otago by a loyal ex-tenant. But for three or four generations the special promised land of Highlanders has been Canada, a region of hills, woods, rivers, and lakes, in which the Celt learns soon to feel at home; and when he comes in sight of the Rocky Mountains he hails a new, a greater, a brighter Lochaber rising up to the gates of heaven, where whole clans of angelic pipers, tartan-winged, will welcome him at last with all their pibrochs played in one celestial chorus.
Across the Atlantic, the sea-sick and home-sick emigrants’ troubles were not always over at once. They had often to suffer sorely from ill-laid plans, or from want of plans, throwing them on the charity of a new country. The new lairds, who were glad to get rid of them, thought they did enough in paying the passage of helpless glensmen thrown among bewildering scenes. But every fresh Highlander landed was a friend to those who followed his example; and in a country that has room for half a dozen Scotlands it would be a hale and hearty man’s own fault if he did not soon clear out for himself a home and livelihood free from help or hindrance of chief as of factor. Their present prosperity is attested by the fact that “Mac” seems almost a title for Canadian statesmen, and by names of towns and counties scattered over the Dominion—Macdonald, Mackenzie, Dundas, Lennox, Inverness, Seaforth, Gareloch, Wallace, and of course Campbeltown. In travelling by train through Ontario the Scottish wanderer’s heart may come into his mouth at the familiar sound of station after station. Clans have in some parts settled down together, the Catholic ones keeping their priests and least forgetting the language in which they continue to pray. Many of these exiles not only cherish their Gaelic but, it appears, the particular dialect of their original district, handed down to generations that never set foot on Scottish soil. To-day there is perhaps more Gaelic spoken in Canada than in all Scotland. There is also a clan of French-speaking Macs, descended from Highland soldiers who married and settled among the daughters of Heth.
Those Canadians who have given in to the conquering Saxon tongue make up for such defection by an earnest cult of bagpipes, kilts, and reels, flaunting red knees in a clime of blue noses, and lustily singing the songs of Caledonian Sion in what is now no strange land. The Dominion rears battalions of kilted warriors, that skirl defiance to the mosquitry of summer as to the snows of winter. Britain has lately been visited by a Canadian “Kiltie” Band, three score strong, making on Sassenach platforms such a revived show of tartan as is hardly to be seen in all the Highlands. One of them, belonging to the MacAnak clan, stood seven feet high, a hopeful sign of what the race may grow to in its new home, when Old Scotland has been given up to American millionaires, English tourists, and German waiters. Of such tuneful transatlantic Scotians one need not inquire too curiously whether “Annie Laurie” or “Robin Adair” would find themselves at home in kilts; but they ought to know what a blot on their fame is the tartan of the Gordons, my hereditary enemies, whose flagrant stripes brand them as no better, in their beginning, than Lowland evictors. One thinks twice about pursuing an ancestral feud against foemen seven feet high; but I must say that if these minstrels were real Gordons, they might well chant masses for the souls of many a Celt who never had the chance to sing:
From the lone shieling on the misty island,
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas;
But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.