When my mother churned milk she lifted the first butter that formed on the top of the cream and placed it against the wall outside the door. It was left there for the fairy folk when they roamed through the country at midnight. They would not harm those who gave them an offering in that manner, but the people who forgot them would have illness among their cattle through all the length of the year.
If my father met a red-haired woman when he was going to the market he would turn home. To meet a red-haired woman on the high-road is very unlucky.
It is a bad market where there are more women than men. "Two women and a goose make a market," is the saying among the Glenmornan folk.
If my mother chanced to overturn the milk which she had drawn from the cow, she would say these words: "Our loss go with it. Them that it goes to need it more than we do." One day I asked her who were the people to whom it went. "The gentle folk," she told me. These were the fairies.
You very seldom hear persons called by their surname in Glenmornan. Every second person you meet there is either a Boyle or an O'Donnell. You want to ask a question about Hugh O'Donnell. "Is it Patrick's Hugh or Mickey's Hugh or Sean's Hugh?" you will be asked. So too in the Glen you never say Mrs. when speaking of a married woman. It is just "Farley's Brigid" or "Patrick's Norah" or "Cormac's Ellen," as the case may be. There was one woman in Glenmornan who had a little boy of about my age, and she seldom spoke to anybody on the road to chapel or market. Everyone seemed to avoid her, and the old people called her "that woman," and they often spoke about her doings. She had never a man of her own, they said. Of course I didn't understand these things, but I knew there was a great difference in being called somebody's Mary or Norah instead of "that woman."
On St. Stephen's Day the Glenmornan boys beat the bushes and killed as many wrens as they could lay their hands on. The wren is a bad bird, for it betrayed St. Stephen to the Jews when they wanted to put him to death. The saint hid in a clump of bushes, but the wrens made such a chatter and clatter that the Jews, when passing, stopped to see what annoyed the birds, and found the saint hiding in the undergrowth. No wonder then that the Glenmornan people have a grudge against the wren!
Kissing is almost unknown in the place where I was born and bred. Judas betrayed the Son of God with a kiss, which proves beyond a doubt that kissing is of the devil's making. It is no harm to kiss the dead in Glenmornan, for no one can do any harm to the dead.
Once I got bitten by a dog. The animal snapped a piece of flesh from my leg and ate it when he got out of the way. When I came into my own house my father and mother were awfully frightened. If three hairs of the dog that bit me were not placed against the sore I would go mad before seven moons had faded. Oiney Dinchy, who owned the dog, would not give me three hairs because I was unfortunate enough to be stealing apples when the dog rushed at me. For all that it mattered to Oiney, I might go as mad as a March hare. The priest, when informed of the trouble, blessed salt which he told my father to place on the wound. My father did so, but the salt pained me so much that I rushed screaming from the house. The next door neighbours ran into their homes and closed their doors when they heard me scream. Two little girls were coming to our house for the loan of a half-bottle of holy water for a sick cow, and when they saw me rush out they fled hurriedly, shrieking that I was already mad from the bite of Oiney Dinchy's dog. When Oiney heard this he got frightened and he gave my father three hairs of the dog with a civil hand. I placed them on my sore, the dog was hung by a rope from the branch of a tree, and the madness was kept away from me. I hear that nowadays in Glenmornan the people never apply the holy salt to the bite of a dog. Thus do old customs change.
The six-hand reel is a favourite Glenmornan dance, but in my time a new parish priest came along who did not approve of dancing. "The six-hand reel is a circle, the centre of which is the devil," said he, and called a house in which a dance was held the "Devil's Station." He told the people to cease dancing, but they would not listen to him. "When we get a new parish priest we don't want a new God," they said. "The old God who allowed dancing is good enough for us." The priest put the seven curses on the people who said these words. I only know three of the seven curses.
May you have one leg and it to be halting.