"Bless me, Angus! do you wear a weapon of that kind about you? I never knew it before," said John Sommerville to his friend Angus M'Intyre, as he sat looking at him one morning performing his toilet; an operation which discovered the latter thrusting a skean dhu—which all our readers know is a short knife, with a black horn handle, once a favourite weapon of the Highlanders—beneath the breast of his coat, into a sheath which seemed to have been placed there for the especial purpose.
"Did you not know that before, John?" said Angus, with a faint smile, but at the same time evidently desiring that there should be no more remarks made on the subject; for he hastily buttoned up his coat, after having placed the weapon in its sheath, as if to cut the conversation short by putting its subject out of sight.
"No, indeed, I did not," replied Sommerville. "I never saw it before, and never heard you carried such a thing about you. It's a dangerous weapon, Angus; and you are a more dangerous man than I thought you," he added, smiling.
"Tuts! nonsense, man!" said M'Intyre, impatiently. "It'll never harm you, at any rate, John."
"No, no; I daresay not," replied his friend, good-humouredly; "but it may hurt others, though. Let me see it, Mac."
Angus reluctantly complied with his request, and put the tiny but formidable weapon into his hands.
"It has my initials, I declare, on the handle!" exclaimed Sommerville, as he looked at the letters J. S. which were engraved on the butt-end of the knife.
"Yes," replied his friend; "it belonged to my maternal grandfather, John Stewart of Ardnahulish."
Sommerville returned the weapon without further remark, and here the conversation dropped. We will avail ourselves of the opportunity to say who the parties were whom we have thus somewhat abruptly introduced to the reader.
Angus M'Intyre was a native of the Island of Skye, in the West Highlands of Scotland, and was, at the period of our story (now a pretty old one, as it happened in the year 17—), an officer of excise in Glasgow. At this period, the Highland character had not lost all its original ferocity, and, consequently, the circumstance of an officer of excise, who was a Highlander, wearing a dirk, even in the discharge of the peaceable duties—though they were not always so either—that fell to his lot in a large town, was not by any means considered so very extraordinary a thing as it would be now. M'Intyre, as we have said, was a native of the West Highlands of Scotland, and an admirable specimen of the hardy and intrepid race from which he sprang. He was a very handsome man, and of the most daring courage, as had been often proved in the perilous adventures in which his profession occasionally engaged him. He was, however, of a remarkably quiet disposition, though fiery and irascible when provoked; but so much did the former prevail in his nature, that no one who did not know him intimately would have guessed how fiery a spirit lay couched underneath this thin covering of placidity, nor deemed, unless they saw that spirit roused, how formidable a man in his anger its possessor was. Yet, withal, was he a man of a kind and generous heart. The habit of carrying the deadly weapon to which we have alluded, Angus had acquired when a youth in the Highlands, where it was then common to be so armed; and this habit had adhered to him, notwithstanding the entire change of life to which his new occupation as an excise officer had introduced him. Angus, in short, although they had made him a clergyman, would, it was believed by those who knew him, have carried his skean dhu with him to the pulpit. He made no boast, however, of being possessed of this weapon. On the contrary, as we have already in part shown, he very much disliked any allusion to it; for it was known by a few of his most intimate friends that he did carry such a thing about with him, and by these such allusions were sometimes made; but the former, although they had often seen his naturally fiery temper put to very severe test, never knew an instance of his having taken advantage of his concealed arms, even to the extent of a threat, excepting in the single instance of which we are about to speak; but that alone is sufficient to show—in a very striking light, we think—the miserable effects of introducing or maintaining barbarous habits—more especially that of wearing secret weapons—into civilised and social life.