[23] Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland (1811), vol. ii., p. 143. Writing some thirty years earlier she expressed herself to the same effect in her Letters from the Mountains, vol. ii., p. 103.
[24] There were probably many descents and slaughters in these islands of which no historic record remains. It is known, however, that in 1585 a party of Macdonalds from Skye was forced by stress of weather to take refuge in the part of Jura belonging to Maclean of Dowart. Two gentlemen of the Macdonald clan, independently driven at the same time into a neighbouring inlet, remained concealed from their kinsmen and secretly carried off by night a number of Maclean’s cattle, which they took with them to sea, intending that the blame should fall on their chief. The Macleans, on discovering the robbery, attacked the Macdonalds who remained, and slew sixty of them, the chief escaping only because he had slept that night on board his galley.
[25] See J. G. Campbell’s Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900), pp. 112, 114, 121.
[26] Letters from the Mountains, vol. i., p. 112; Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland, vol. ii., p. 202.
[27] A. Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, 1900, Introduction, p. xxvi. Dr. Norman Macleod, who had no sympathy with this bigotry, relates—‘A minister in a remote island parish once informed me that “on religious grounds,” he had broken the only fiddle on the island. His notion of religion, I fear, is not rare among his brethren in the far west and north.’—Reminiscences of a Highland Parish, p. 35.
[28] A. Carmichael, op. cit., p. xxviii.
[29] A. Carmichael, op. cit., vol. i., pp. 258, 276.
[30] This anecdote has been variously related; but the version given here is probably the true one.
[31] Translated from the Gaelic by A. Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, vol. ii., p. 235.
[32] In another version the predatory animal has become a wild sow!