A Lame Dog's Diary

by S. Macnaughtan

We talk of returning home at the end of next week, and Mrs. Fielden and our other two guests are leaving on Monday, I believe.

Mrs. Fielden looks much prettier in the Highlands, I think, than anywhere else. Young Finlayson is in love with her, and I believe has offered her his heart and the ironmongery business with it; but I think of all her lovers Anthony Crawshay is the one she likes best. He is the only one for whom her moods never alter, and to whom she is always gracious and charming and sweet. Perhaps it is in a quiet, less radiant way than that in which she treats others, but it is with an unvarying loving-kindness which I have not seen her bestow elsewhere. And Anthony Crawshay is a good fellow—one of the best.

Old Mr. Finlayson actually donned a kilt for the gillies' dance; young Finlayson also wore the national dress, and Thomas tells me that they have sported the Macdonald tartan, and wants to know why. Old Finlayson met us at the door of his baronial hall in a clannish, feudal sort of way, and seizing his glengarry bonnet from his head he flung it down upon the oak settle in the hall, and exclaimed in hearty accents, "Welcome to the Glen." The Misses Finlayson wore sashes of royal Stuart tartan put plaid-wise across their shoulders. Mrs. Finlayson was dressed in a very regal manner which I cannot attempt to describe, and her platform voice was in use throughout the entire evening.

Ellicomb said the dance was barbaric, but Thomas enjoyed the evening immensely, and so did Crawshay, who said in his hearty way, "The Finlaysons did us uncommonly well," and shouted out, "Not at all bad people, not at all bad."

After dinner old Finlayson showed us all the pictures in the hall by the light of a long wax taper which he held above his head, and he pointed out the beauties of the house in a proprietary way, even to Evan himself, to whom the place belongs. Evan Sinclair, in a shabby green doublet, accepted all Mr. Finlayson's wildest statements about his own house with a queer, humorous grin on his face, and submitted to being patronized by the Miss Finlaysons, whose commercial instincts, no doubt, caused them to despise a young man who was obliged to let his place.

One of the Highland axioms which the Finlaysons have accepted is that "a man's a man for a' that," and they shook hands with every one in an effusive way, and condescended to a queer sort of familiarity with the boatmen and keepers about the place. The daughters of the house, with flying tartan ribbons, swung the young gillies about in the intricate figures of the hoolichan, and talked to them with a heartiness which one would hardly have thought possible of the Clarkham young ladies. The Finlaysons had a large number of English guests staying in the house for the dance. These all made the same joke when the pipes began to play. "Is the pig being killed?" they asked, and looked very pleased with their own ready wit.

Red-headed Evan Sinclair carried his old green doublet and battered silver ornaments very well, and his neat dancing was in pleasant contrast to the curious bounds and leaps of the Finlaysons. Old Mr. Finlayson spent his evening strutting about in a kindly, important fashion, and in making Athole Brose after a recipe supplied by Tyne Drum, who superintended the brewing of it himself.

I hope I am not fanciful when I say that the pipes when I hear them have to me something irresistibly sad about them, and that they conjure up many fantasies in my head which I am half ashamed to put down on paper. They seem to me to gather up in their bitter sobbings all the sorrows of a people who have suffered much and have said very little about it. There is the cry in them of children dying in the lonely glens in winter-time, when the wind howls round the clachan and the snow fills the passes. One almost sees the little procession of black-coated men bearing away a tiny burden from the cottage door into the whiteness beyond, with its one heaped-up patch of brown earth on either side of the little grave. They wail, too, of the Killing Time, when the Covenanters were crushed but never broken under persecution; and one seems to see the defiant gray-haired old men, with their splendid obstinacy, unmoved by threats—not defiant, but simply unbreakable. Thinking of the Covenanters as they pass slowly before one to the sighing of the pipes, one wonders if it is possible to punish by death the man who is content to die.

The tuneful reeds sob out, too, the story of the Prince for whom so many brave men bled, and they tell again of the days of song, and of noble legends and deeds of daring when the nation spent its passionate love on its King. "Come back! come back!" The desolate cry of the times. Almost one hears it sounding across the hills, and it seems to me that all that it is so hard to speak, so hard even to look, may perhaps be told in music. And I think loyalty and love speak very beautifully in the old Jacobite airs.

Again, as Evan's piper marches up and down in the moonlight playing a lament, the romance of life seems lost in the hardness of it, its stress and its loss. "Hame, hame, hame!" the pipes sob forth, crying for the homes that are sold to strangers, and for the hills and the glens which pass away from the old hands. It is "Good-bye, good-bye," an eternity of farewells. And still, wherever life is most difficult, wherever comforts are fewest and work is most hard, in the distant parts of the world are the Scottish exiles. But I know that all the world over the sons of the heather and the mist, in however distant or alien lands they may be, feel always, as they steer their way through life, that there is a pole-star by which they set their compass; and that some day, perhaps, they or their children may steer the boat to a haven on some rocky shore, where the whaup calls shrilly on the moors above the loch, and the heather grows strong and tough on the hillside, and the peat reek rises almost like the incense of an evening prayer, against a gray, soft sky in the land of the North.