unclad feet, and with hair streaming like that of Mr. Gray’s bard. How they rush after our carriage like London arabs! I am sorry I don’t carry coppers. Late as the season is, a few women are hay-making. What sunburnt, weather-beaten, wrinkled faces they have! Plump and buxom at eighteen, they are old women when they have reached twice that age.
As to Glencoe, what can I say of it that is not already recorded in the guide-books, and familiar to the reader of English history? The road is carried along the edge of Loch Leven, and is really romantic, with the rocks on one side, the winding glen in front, and the loch beneath. It is very narrow, and as we meet two four-horse cars returning with tourists we have scarce room to pass. Another inch would send us howling over into the loch below, but our steeds and our driver are trustworthy, and no such accident is to be feared. In the loch beneath we see St. Mungo’s Isle, marked by the ruins of a chapel, and long used as a burial-place, the Lochaber people at one end, the Glencoe people at the other, as their dust may no more intermingle than may that of Churchmen and Dissenters in some parts of
England. A little further on is the gable wall, still standing, of the house of M‘Ian, the unfortunate chief, who was shot down by his own fireside on that memorable morning of February, 1690. Is it for this the Glasgow people erected a statue to William III.? Further on we see the stones still remaining of what were once houses in which lived and loved fair women and brave men. One sickens now as we read the story of that atrocious massacre. A little more on our right is a rocky knoll, from which, it is said, the signal pistol-shot was fired. Happily, such atrocities are now out of date, but the blot remains to sully the fair fame of our great Protestant hero, and to stain to all eternity the memories of such men as Argyll and Stairs. Independently of the massacre, the spot is well worthy of a visit. There is no more rocky and weird a glen in all Scotland, and when the sun is hidden the aspect of the place is sombre in the extreme, and the further you advance the more does it become such. The larch and fir disappear from the sides of the hills, the river Coe dashes angrily and noisily at their feet, and before us is the waterfall which, here they tell us, was Ossian’s shower-bath. Close by, Ossian
himself is reported to have been born, and what more natural than that he should thus have utilised the stream? On the south is the mountain of Malmor, and to the north is the celebrated Car Fion, or the hill of Fingal. I gather a thistle as a souvenir of the place. Of course it is a Scotch thistle, therefore to be honoured, but for the credit of my native land, I must say it is a pigmy to such as I have seen within a dozen miles of St. Paul’s. As a Saxon, I am especially interested in the horned sheep in these parts, which at first sight naturally you take for goats; with the Highland cattle, though by no means the fine specimens you see at the Agricultural Hall, and with the exquisite aroma (when taken in moderation) of the Ben Nevis “mountain dew.” Returning, we pass the entrance to the Caledonian Canal—called by the natives the canawl—along which we were to have made our way to Nairn; but the Elena scorns the narrow confines of the canal, and claims to be a free rover of the sea.
CHAPTER V.
off mull.
As I sit musing in the dining-saloon of the Elena, it occurs to me that a Scotchman is bound to be a better educated man than an Englishman; for these simple reasons—in the first place, he does not drink beer—and beer is fatal to the intellect, inasmuch as it magnifies and fattens the body; and secondly, because the climate compels him to lead the life of a student. In the south, we Englishmen have fine weather. In this world everything is comparative. We in Middlesex may not have the warm sunshine and blue skies of France or Italy, but we have weather which admits of garden parties, and country sports, and pastimes; up in this region of mountain, rock, and river, it is perpetually blowing big guns or raining cats and dogs, and the Scotchman, as he can’t go out, must sit at home and improve his mind. In dull weather Oban is not a lively spot,
but here at Tobermory dulness fails adequately to express the thorough stagnation of the place. Few of my readers have ever heard of Tobermory; yet Tobermory is the principal town—indeed, the only one that is to be found in all Mull. It rose to its present height of greatness as far back as the year 1788, when it was developed under the auspices of the Society for the Encouragement of British Fisheries. But the place was founded before then, as three or four miles off there are the remains of a monastery, and in a niche in the wall of one of the hotels there was, evidently, a crucifix or an image of the Virgin Mary, whose name seems to be connected with the town. Tobermory means Well of St. Mary, and up at the top of the town there is shown to you the well of that name. The Florida, one of the ships of the Spanish Armada, was sunk off Tobermory, and some of her timbers and her brass and iron guns have occasionally been fished up. The place must be valuable, as the present proprietor gave £90,000 for the estate, which had been bought by the former owner for about a third of that sum. The house and ground are on the left, and his yacht lies in the bay as we enter. By our side are a few trading vessels
which have entered the harbour for shelter. On the right, at the entrance of the harbour, is a rock, on which some one has had painted, in large red letters, “God is love.” In rough seas, on this rock-bound coast, where the wind howls like a hurricane as it rushes down the gorges of the hills, and where the Atlantic seems to gather up its strength, here and there, at fitful intervals, ere it becomes still and tame—under the soothing influence of Scotch bag-pipes—it is well to remind the traveller on the deep that He, who holds the waters in the hollow of His hands, is love. Tobermory is, I imagine, a very religious place; on a Sunday night the Sheriff preaches in the Court House, and there, on our left, is a Baptist chapel—where, once upon a time, the Doctor preached, and in his warmth upset the candle over the head and shoulders of his colleague sitting below—and up on the hill is a kirk and a churchyard; the latter, as is the case with all the churchyards in this part of the world, in a truly disgraceful state of neglect, with the graves, which are but a few inches deep, covered with long grass and weeds. At one corner is what evidently was a receptacle for holy water, and all around the place there is an antiquity—in the
grass growing in many of the streets, in the deserted walls of houses crumbling to decay, in the weather-beaten, ancient look of the people, certainly by no means suggestive of gaiety or life. Tobermory reminds me, says the Doctor, of what the auld woman said of the sermon—that it was neither amusing nor edifying. The Doctor’s lady, overcome by her feelings, writes verses, which I transcribe for the benefit of my readers who may not enjoy the honour of her acquaintance.
“Off Mull
’Tis rather dull.
Hope is vain,
Down pours the rain;
The wind howls
Like groans of ghouls.”