To mow the corn and hay, sir.”
With this son of Erin was a dirty and very skinny Highland lad, in kilts and other checkered woollen garments much the worse for wear. He also danced what was probably a Highland fling, though an almost vicious desire possessed some of us to fling him into the bathtub.
It is a good sign for the future of a noble race that the manufacture of soap occupies many people in Scotland. Though the glens are full of distilleries, which are sure to create poverty and dirt, perhaps we must consider soap-boiling as a very honorable occupation and the manufacture of this cleansing material as an antidote to some of the mischief done by John Barleycorn. How terrible is the scourge of alcohol in Great Britain was revealed, as never before, during the war crisis of 1915, when even an appeal to patriotism could not make the sodden workmen give up their cups. My kinsman, the United States Consul at Dundee, showed me the statistics of the liquor traffic in Scotland alone, which were appalling. Even Christians, supposed to be devout in worship and genuine in faith, invest their money, and some of them exclusively, in the distilleries, thus upsetting at one end what the gospel agencies are doing at the other. The British Empire is thus handicapped in the race for progress. Yet who from the glorious Yankee nation can throw a stone, especially when he sees the “American bar,” “American long drinks,” and “American mixed drinks” flauntingly advertised in Europe? We have heard, however, that the “long drinks” are soft and harmless.
While propelled along Loch Ness, an earth-cleft, narrow, deep, and twenty-four miles in length, we are again reminded of our home near Lake Cayuga, fairest in the Iroquois chain of “finger lakes” in the Empire State, and one of the deepest; for on either side of the Caledonian Canal are metamorphic rocks rising out of crystal clear water, and beneath, in the Byronic profundity of “a thousand feet in depth below,” the rocky bottom. Grander and more rugged, however, is the scenery, for the mountains are here higher, even as the water is deeper, than in Iroquois land. The Scottish Highlands are the fragments of the earliest land that emerged above the prehistoric oceans. For centuries they formed a boundary in ethnology, politics, and religion, even as in the æons of geology they form a frontier of chronology.
When our voyage ends, we find that it is some distance between the stopping-place of the steamer at Muirtown and Inverness. Since names and sounds are continually playing tricks, summoning from the privacy of memory forms long ago forgotten and ever retreating in the perspective of the past, I recall my old Scotch professor at the Central High School in Philadelphia. That good man MacMurtrie—with a name meaning, I suppose, of, or from, or son of the Muirtrie, or Moor-tree clan—first introduced thousands of youth, through his lexicon, his fascinating lectures, and his choice cabinets, to the great world of nature and science, and to the rapturous joy of discovery of order and beauty in the mathematics of the universe.
From Muirtown, we take the hotel omnibus and soon enter “Rose-red Inverness,” the bright and lively town, which in August bursts into the full bloom of its summer activities.
CHAPTER XIV
INVERNESS: THE CAPITAL OF THE HIGHLANDS
One of the first things we noticed in this summer capital of the Highlands was a male being, whom Thackeray would have liked to cage for his “Book of Snobs.” From the monocle, or window in his eye, and from certain physical peculiarities, and even pronunciation in his speech, which he was helpless to conceal, I should imagine that he was really a London cockney masquerading in a Highlander’s costume. According to the fad or fashion of vacation time, and appropriate for hot weather, he was encased in the complete pavonine dress of the old days of clans and claymores, but the motor within hardly suited the machine. With his buckled shoes, checkered leggings,—in the side of one of which was stuck a long dirk, having a silver handle holding a Cairngorm stone set in the top,—with considerable public exposure of the cuticle around and above his skinny knees, with gay kilts, decorated pouch, shoulder-brooch of silver, coat, plaid, bonnet, and feather, the pageant of costume seemed vastly more imposing than the man within.
This creature seemed a walking museum of Scottish antiquities. All his unwonted paraphernalia, however, did not cure his gawkiness or prevent impending disaster to his pride. In trying to pass by some baskets belonging to a huckster, and full, if I remember aright, of turnips, his dirk-handle caught in the end of a loose hoop. “Oh, what a fall was there, my countrymen!” In a moment one would have taken him for a measuring-rod. At least six feet of the gawk, more or less, lay on the soil of what may have been his beloved native land. Nevertheless, in all Christian charity, we tried our best to appear blind, and resisted the temptation to laugh.
I am bound to say, however, that I saw some solid-looking citizens of Inverness wear the kilt and Highland coat most gracefully. Moreover, in the evening, when some of the Gordon Highlanders,—I believe they were,—whose barracks were not far away, rambled through the streets, they certainly showed that the man and the clothes had grown together.