Near Duntulm Castle was a shooting-lodge; on the water a steam-yacht lay at anchor. The slave-driver is found for at least six weeks in the midst of his slaves.
We arrived at the inn about three in the afternoon, drenched and weary. A room was ready for us, a bright fire burning on the hearth. They always expected people to come home wet, the landlord's daughter said. She carried off our wet clothes; she lent me a dress; she brought us hot whiskey and water. One must be thoroughly tired to know what comfort means.
We had our tea with two English maiden ladies of the species one meets in Swiss and Italian pensions. We sat in a well-warmed room at a well-spread table. In the black, smoky huts half-starved men, women, and children were eating dry oatmeal; a few, perhaps, drinking tea with it. This is the extravagance with which the crofters have been reproached. They buy, or rather go into debt for, tea and sugar as well as meal, and therefore their landlords think them prosperous. They have never been so well off before, the Commissioners were told; once they lived on shell-fish throughout the summer. Yes, it was true, a minister of Snizort admitted, they did drink tea. But the people have no milk, now pasture-land has been taken from them. The landlord needed it for his large sheep farms and deer forests. I suppose they should go back to the shell-fish as of old. If they have food to eat, why complain of its quality? If this be so, if crofters of to-day, compared to their ancestors, live in luxury, then has the time indeed come when something should be done for them. Who will call them lazy or indifferent who has considered what the life of the Islander has been for generations? The wonder is that he has energy enough to keep on living.
We went the next day to
DUNVEGAN.
The road lay over long miles of moors, with now and then beautiful distant views of the mountains of Harris, but pale blue shadows oil the western horizon, and of the high peaks of the Cuchullins, dark and sombre above the moorland.
Here and there at long intervals we came to the wretched groups of cottages we had begun to know so well. Old witch-like women and young girls passed, bent double under loads of peat or sea-weed, so heavy that were the same thing seen in Italy, English people would long since have filled columns of the Times with their sympathy. As it is, these burdens are accepted as a matter of course, or sometimes even as but one of the many picturesque elements of Highland life. From one writer one hears of the Skye lassies, half hidden under bundles of heather, stopping to laugh and chatter; from another of Lewis women knitting contentedly as they walked along with creels, bearing burdens that would have appalled a railway porter of the south, strapped to their backs. We saw no smiles, no signs of contentment. On the faces of the strongest women there was a look of weariness and of pain. But perhaps the most pathetic faces in this land of sorrow were those of the children, already pinched and care-worn. I know others who have felt this even as we did. An Englishman who last summer spent a week in Skye has since told us how day after day he and his wife went upon their excursions lunchless, because in the first village to which they came they emptied their luncheon-basket among the half-naked, half-starved children they found there. They could not bear the sight of the hungry little faces. But even in his sympathy, the general poverty seemed to him only right, he said, since it is in such perfect harmony with the dismal, dreary land in which the people live. If they were happy, however, if moors and hills were green with their crops, would it still seem so dismal?
A REAL HIGHLAND LASSIE.