INTERIOR OF A WEAVER'S COTTAGE.
As we left the hut on the hill-side, the first we visited, "I beg pardon," said the old crofter, who had not understood J——'s thanks. His words seemed a reproach. We felt that we should be begging his pardon. To force our way in upon him in his degradation was to add one more to the many insults he has had to bear. He stood at the door a minute, and then went back into the gloom of the low room, with its mud floor and smoky rafters, which he calls his home.
All day long, even when the sun shone, as it did at intervals during our stay, Harris was a land of sorrow and desolation, but in the evening it became a land of beauty. The black rock of the mountain-side softened into purple shadows against the gold of sky and sea, and in this glory the hovels and the people and the misery disappeared. And when the sun sank behind the western waters and the gold faded, there fell a great peace over the island, and with it began the twilight, that lingered until it grew into the coming day.
It was on Sunday mornings that there was greatest stir in Tarbert. Then the people came from far and near to meet in the little kirk overlooking the loch. We were told that comparatively few were at home. This was the season when they go to the east coast, the men to the fishing, the women to the curing-houses; but we thought they came in goodly numbers as we watched them winding with the road down the opposite hill-side, and scrambling over the rocks behind the town. Boats one by one sailed into the loch and to the pier, bringing with them old women in clean white caps and tartan shawls, younger women in feathered hats and overskirts, men in bonnets and blue sailor-cloth. They were a fine-looking set of people, here and there among them a face beautiful with the rich, dark beauty of the South—all that is left of the Armada. As they came up upon the pier they stopped in groups under the shelter of a boat-house, for the wind was high, the men to comb their beards and hair, the women to tie one another's bonnet-strings and scarfs, to smooth one another's shawls. And all the time scarce a word was spoken; they were as solemn at their toilet as if already they stood in church.
The Islanders are as melancholy as the wilderness in which they live. The stranger among them never gets used to their perpetual silence. Their troubles have made them turn from the amusements they once loved. The pipes now seldom are heard in the Hebrides. Their one consolation, their one resource, is religion, and to them religion is a tragedy. Nowhere was the great conflict in the Church of Scotland fought with such intensity, such passion, as in Skye. That same Sunday in Harris, we met the people coming home over the hills, and still they walked each alone, and all in unbroken silence. And this Sabbath stillness lasts throughout the week.
It is not only in Mr. Black's novels you meet kings in the Lews. From out of the boats laden with worshippers there stepped the King of Scalpa. He is a Campbell, we were told; and what is more, if he had his rights it is he who would bear the Argyll titles, enjoy the Argyll wealth, instead of the Campbell who calls himself Duke and writes books in the castle at Inverary. His story is the usual romance of the Highlands: a murder, a flight, the succession of the younger brother to titles and estates, the descendants of the murderer, exiles in a far island. And so it is that the real Duke of Argyll is but a merchant in Scalpa. However, if the so-called Duke had nothing more serious to fear than the pretensions of the King of Scalpa, he might rest at ease. It is his right not to a name, but to the privilege to do with his own as he likes, that he must needs defend. He can afford to ignore the Campbells of the Outer Hebrides; but let him fight with his deadliest weapons against the crofters who to-day pay him rent. All the arguments he has set forth in "Scotland as it Was, and Scotland as it Is," in themselves are not enough to avert the day of reckoning which even to him, apparently, seems so near at hand.
We left Harris, as we came to it, in the Dunara Castle, and dropped anchor in the Bay of Uig, in
SKYE,
one morning while the day was still young. The shores were circled about with patches of grain and potatoes and many cottages; and Skye, as we first saw it, seemed fair and fertile after the rocks of Harris. Its people are little better off, however. It was here, about Uig, on the estates of Captain Fraser, that crofters rebelled in 1884 as those of Lewis are rebelling to-day. Their rents in many cases have been reduced, their arrears cancelled. But landlords as they exist, or crofters, must go before there can be more than negative improvement in the islands.