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CROFTERS' COTTAGES NEAR UIG, SKYE.

OUR JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES.
By JOSEPH PENNELL and ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL.

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE

MDCCCXC

PREFACE.

The greater part of "Our Journey to the Hebrides" was published originally in Harper's Magazine. When it appeared it was severely criticised, and we were taken to task for not discovering in Scotland and the Scotch what has been made the fashion to find there—for not giving second-hand descriptions, which are the stock in trade of Scotch guide-books, whether romantic or real; in a word, for not staying at home and manufacturing our journey in the British Museum.

It is gradually dawning upon us that this is what is wanted by the majority of critics. To go to a country and tell what really happened to you—to dare to say, for the information of future cyclers or travellers, that one small piece of road is bad, that on one day out of ten or fifteen it rained, that at one small hotel you were uncomfortable or turned away, is enough to make the critic declare that you have found everything in that country to be awry. This was our fate when we attempted to describe the most enjoyable trip we ever made—our ride across France. We have no hesitation in saying that our trip to Scotland was the most miserable. We undertook to walk, owing to the misrepresentations of people who we do not believe ever in their lives walked half as far as we did a year ago. As we have shown, when tramping became unendurable we went by coach or train, by steamer or sail-boat; but we walked far enough to see the country as, we venture to think, it has seldom been seen by other travellers. For, with all its drawbacks, walking has this one advantage: not only do you stop at the correct show-places on your route, but you go slowly over the unknown country which lies between them. That the weather in the Western Highlands and Islands is vile is a fact which cannot be denied, though to mention it is held to be a crime. But, for the benefit of those who, because we speak of the rain and of the fatigue of walking, think we shut our eyes to everything else on our journey, let us say here, once and for all, that we found the whole country BEAUTIFUL and full of the most WONDERFUL EFFECTS; but we must also add that it is the most abominable to travel through, and its people are the most down-trodden on God's earth.

This is the best and most concise description of the Western Highlands and Islands that could be given.

Because we saw and described the actual condition of the population, and ignored the pleasures—in which we might have joined—of a handful of landlords and sportsmen whose fathers brought about this condition, and who themselves are fighting to maintain it, we have been asked what is the use of digging up ancient history? Thank Heaven, it is now two years since the Crofters' Act was passed by Parliament; but when we were in the Islands the first test case of a tenant pleading against the landlord who wished to evict him was tried, and gained by the tenant. While we were in Barra, the disenfranchisement of the entire island was accomplished by a trick which the most unscrupulous American politician would not have dared to play. The Crofters' Commission had then just begun to reduce rents—fifty-seven per cent. is the average reduction—and to cancel arrears. It has raised rents on certain estates, is an argument used by landlords, who forget to tell you that where rents have been raised they have been compelled to give back pasture-land to the crofters. It was but a few weeks after our return to London that a rebellion broke out in the Island of Lewis, and was quelled only by the decision of the Edinburgh Court, which declared deer not to be protected by law; so that for the rest of the winter crofters and cotters ate venison with their oatmeal. It was this decision, and not the war-ships, which prevented open insurrection in all the Islands.

Some of our critics have been good enough to inform us that crofters were never turned off their crofts to make room for deer. With those who refuse to accept the testimony officially published in the Blue-books there is no use to enter into a discussion. For those who know little of the subject, and for whom Blue-books would necessitate long study, here are the facts—facts which no one can question—in a nutshell. We quote from an article on "The Crofters of the Highlands," published in the Westminster Review for February, 1888:

"In addition to these many injustices" (injustices, that is, suffered by the crofters), "there is one which in certain districts almost overshadows them all; namely, the absorption of vast areas, embracing much fertile land in deer forests. It matters little whether crofters were actually evicted to make room for deer, or whether sheep farms have been converted to this purpose; both have happened very largely, with the result that, according to the Royal Commissioners, about two million acres are now devoted to deer forests. Large as this figure is, it is considerably below the mark, as has been shown by even better authorities on the subject. Nor must it be supposed that deer forests consist merely of barren and worthless land. Unless there is a large amount of good grass-land in a forest the deer would starve, and all this good land in times past supported a large population, whose descendants are now suffering destitution in the bare and unfruitful regions near the coast."

To their shame be it said, the American millionaires who are beginning to rent these deer forests are the men who are now doing the most to encourage the continuance in their present position of the sons of the land-grabbers, or, we should say, the heroes of the ancient history and romance of the country.

There is another evil of these great deer forests which should not be forgotten. A crofter, after working all day, often has to sit up all night to keep these beasts, which were supposed to be private property, out of his little croft. For if the deer eat all his crops, he had no redress; if the crofter shot one of them, or hurt it in any way in driving it out, you may be sure the factor made him suffer for it—at one time he would most likely have been evicted. We want it to be understood that in these vast tracts of deer forest none but sportsmen and game-keepers are allowed to go. If your house were to lie on one side and the village on the other, you would have to go miles around to reach it. Nor can you go near streams which run in the open country, for fear you may disturb the fish, which are preserved for English or American sportsmen.

Just as we are writing this Preface we have begun to receive, for the first time in our lives, anonymous letters. Hitherto we did not believe there were people stupid and imbecile enough to write such things. One of these creatures, who is ashamed of his own identity, encloses, with an amusing letter written on Kansas City Club paper—which, however, does not reveal whether he is the president or the hall porter of the club—an article of a column and a half from the Scotsman, which calls our "Journey to the Hebrides" "sentimental nonsense," "culpable misrepresentation," "amazing impertinence." And then, without attempting to show in what the misrepresentation or nonsense or impertinence consists, the writer of this article goes on to give his own ideas on the subject of the crofters, quoting statements made from other sources, and attributing them to us, misrepresenting us, and yet not attempting to contradict any one fact brought forward in any one of the articles, but taking up space in the paper to contradict the reports of the Scotsman's own reporter, printed but a few months before. We are accused of exaggerating the misery of the people. We have lying by our side as we write, column after column, amounting to page after page, from the Scotsman, which is by no means the crofters' friend, giving detailed pictures of this misery, which we, in our generalizing, could not approach. Here is a specimen taken at hazard from the pile of clippings. "A Tale of Poverty" it is headed, and it was published January 17, 1888:

"Quite a typical case of poverty was that of Donald Mackenzie, a middle-aged man, who occupied a half croft at a rental of £2. He was married, with five young children, and they had been living exclusively on potatoes, occasionally with fish, for three months, until they got a half boll of meal from a destitution fund. That was now done, and he had that day borrowed a bowlful from a neighbour. He had fished at Stornoway in the summer, and had kept the family alive; but his wife assured the stranger that he had not brought home a single shilling. She added that she herself had not had shoes for four years, and the children were no better off. A very similar case was that of Norman Macmillan. He was a cottar and fisherman, having a half lot from another tenant. He had also not taken home a shilling from the fishing last year; and, except working on his lot, he could find nothing to do until the fishing season came on again. He had seven children, the eldest twelve years. They had eaten up their potatoes by the beginning of winter, and now they had but a little barley-meal left. He did not know what to do now, he said, unless Providence opened the way for them. They had often been without food, he said, although they had kept it. There was none to relieve them. He stated that formerly they used to get credit from the merchants while they were engaged at the fishing, but that they did not get now. One of the houses visited in this township was that of the wife of Donald Macmillan, one of the men now standing trial in Edinburgh on a charge of having taken part in the Park deer raid. Macmillan lived in a very small cot at the back of his father's house, which his father had used as a barn. It was very poorly furnished even for that locality. There was a family of five small children, and there was only one bed in the house, with one blanket. Three of the children slept out with a neighbour. Macmillan cultivated the half of his father's croft, and had one cow. He was also a fisherman, having a share in a boat of forty-one feet keel; but, though he had attended the Barra fishing last summer, he had made nothing. His wife had got a boll of meal from the destitution fund, but besides that, she had only two barrels of potatoes. Previous to getting that meal, they had lived exclusively on potatoes. She stated that when her husband went out to the deer raid, there was but one barrel of potatoes; but since then, she explained, she had fallen back upon the seed."

Here is another, from January 20th of the same year, when four columns were devoted to crofter affairs:

"From here a drive of about four miles brought the visitors to Arebruich—a township fixed in a spot which was surely never intended for human beings. As one passes onwards from Balallan, the soil gradually sinks lower and lower on the north side of the loch until, when Arebruich is reached, it is almost level to the water's edge. The result is that the land is literally a floating bog, and it is a miracle how the poor people, who labour away at the barren scraps of earth which show some signs of cultivation, manage to get any food raised out of them. A rude, clayish pathway extends for some little distance from the main road, but it soon stops, as if the builders had thrown up the work in disgust. There are sixteen crofts, such as they are, in the township, and these are occupied by twenty-six families. The first house visited was that of John Mackinnon, a stout, good-looking man in spite of his surroundings. He lives on his mother's lot, which is rented at £2.15s., exclusive of taxes. His mother, who is eighty years old, lives, along with an unmarried daughter, in an adjoining house. He paid 35s. two years ago to the factor, but since then he has been able to pay nothing. He fished as a hired man last year at Lybster; but his earnings were so small that when his season's board was paid he had only 9d. left. A friend had to lend him his passage-money. At present he has three barrels of potatoes left, but neither meal nor money. He has two of a family, besides himself and wife. They have to live on potatoes. His mother never got any parochial relief, and she and her daughter have to struggle along as best they can. He has one cow and eight sheep. When the destitution meal was being distributed he got three stones, and his mother an equal quantity. He does not know what to do, and has no prospects whatever. The next house presented a worse case. It was that of Widow Murdo Macleod, a sister of Mackinnon. She said her husband was drowned at Loch Seaforth seven years ago, when they were only ten months married. She had one daughter, who was born shortly after her husband was drowned. She has made her living all these years by knitting and sewing and odd jobs, but never got any help from the Parochial Board, though she applied several times. She has neither land nor stock, and never had any. She generally gets a few potatoes from her brother at harvest time. She has half a barrel on hand at present, and about a stone of meal, the remains of what was got from the destitution fund. She always tried to be industrious, and therefore was never actually in absolute want. She always enjoyed good health, and felt very thankful for it. The hut in which this woman and her daughter live is wretchedly poor, and the single bed is barely covered with a thin blanket."[A]

On January 20th, in a leader, the same paper declared that the facts which we have given are "distressing," and ought to excite "interest" and sympathy. There is no talk here of sentimental nonsense! Distressing we should think they were. One cannot help saying that it is nothing less than infamous that a mere handful of landlords should have controlled the destiny of, and extracted every penny from, the population of these Islands—the people whom they have kept for generations in poverty, not that they might improve the land, but that they might pass their own time in useless idleness and cruel sport. It is not a question of over-population. The real evil is that the Islanders have been ground down and tyrannized over simply to gratify the amusements of their masters. We have heard again and again that the position of a landlord does not pay; if it did not, the landlords would sell their estates to-morrow.

For weeks, early in this year (1888), every Scotch and English paper, even to the Times, had columns about the misery of the crofters—that is, columns of extracts similar to these we have quoted. Whatever reasons were given for it, no one questioned their destitution. And yet within a year all these reports are forgotten; and for generalizing and not going into details—heart-breaking details—we are called sickly sentimentalists. So glaring is this complete forgetfulness and contradiction that we cannot help taking some notice of it, and calling the attention of these papers to their own reports.

As to the rest of our critics, they did not even know enough to contradict themselves, except in one case, which we have pointed out elsewhere, and their other criticism is not directed against our facts.

In dwelling upon the misery of the people, we do not pretend, as has been suggested, to give an off-hand settlement of the economic problems of the Islands. We merely state what we saw, what it was impossible to avoid seeing, wherever we went. It must be remembered that it is not merely a minority, or even a majority, but the entire population who exist in this condition of absolute wretchedness and semi-starvation. With the exception of a few small towns on the coast for the convenience of tourists and landlords, you find throughout the Islands but the occasional beautiful castle or shooting-lodge, or great farm-house, and the many crowded stone piles politely called cottages. And it was because we were more struck with this misery than with the romance of the past that, our journey over, we interested ourselves in learning something of the immediate reasons for the present condition of the Western Highlanders and Islanders, rather than in reading about the murders and massacres of the MacGregor and the Macleod, the Mac this and the Mac that. We were not blind to the beauty, the sternness, the wildness of the country; but the sadness and sorrows of its people impressed us even more than the wonder and beauty of their land.

Joseph Pennell.
Elizabeth Robins Pennell.

Westminster, November 20, 1888.[B]

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

IN THE HIGHLANDS.

We never looked forward to a pleasure trip with so much misery as we did to our journey to the Hebrides. We wanted a holiday.

"Go to Scotland," suggested the editor of Harper's.

"Let us rather wander through unexplored France," we proposed, in a long letter, though we had already explored it for ourselves more than once.

"Scotland would be better," was the answer in a short note.

"But why not let us discover unknown Holland?" we asked, as if it had not been discovered a hundred times already.

"Scotland would be better," was still the answer, and so to Scotland we went.

It was a country about which we cared little, and knew less. We had heard of Highlands and Lowlands, of Melrose and Stirling, but for our lives we could not have pointed them out on the map. The rest of our knowledge was made up of confused impressions of Hearts of Mid-Lothian and Painters' Camps in the Highlands, Macbeths and Kidnappers, Skye terriers and Shetland shawls, blasted heaths and hills of mist, Rob Roys and Covenanters; and, added to these, positive convictions of an unbroken Scotch silence and of endless breakfasts of oatmeal, dinners of haggis, and suppers of whiskey. Hot whiskey punch is a good thing in its way, and at times, but not as a steady diet. Oatmeal we think an abomination. And as for haggis—well, we only knew it as it was once described to us by a poet: the stomach of some animal filled with all sorts of unpleasant things and then sewed up. We recalled the real dinners and friendly peasants of France and Italy, and hated the very name of Scotland.

It will easily be understood that we could not plan a route out of our ignorance and prejudice. It remained to choose a guide, and our choice, I hardly know why, fell upon Dr. Johnson. Every one must remember—I say this though we did not even know it until we looked into the matter—that Dr. Johnson met Boswell in Edinburgh, and in his company journeyed up the east coast as far as Inverness, then across the Highlands to the west, and so to the Hebrides, coming back by way of Inverary, Loch Lomond, and Glasgow. It looked a long journey on the map, and seemed a weary one in the pages of Boswell and Johnson; but as if this were not bad enough, we made up our minds, for the sake of novelty, to walk.

Of our preparations for the journey I will say nothing. We carried less than Stanley and more than the average tramp. We took many things which we ought not to have taken, and we left behind many things which we ought to have taken. But this matters little, since our advice to all about to start on a walking tour is, Don't.

On the 28th of July we arrived in

EDINBURGH,

"a city too well known to admit description." If Dr. Johnson thought so a hundred years ago, it is not for us, who propose to be his followers, to differ from him. Indeed, during our stay in that city, so eager were we to be faithful to him in all things that we should have allowed ourselves to be dined, teaed and suppered, even as he was, but for an obstacle. The only person whom we knew in Edinburgh was away, and the fame of our coming had not, as with Dr. Johnson, gone before us.

We were careful to find St. James's Court, where Boswell lived, and where clothes, drying in what sun there is, now hang from his windows. And we went to the old White Horse Inn, where the Doctor, on his arrival, stayed until Boswell came to carry him off in triumph; and where probably the tourist of another year will not go, for already in the court-yard are signs of the coming of the destroyer.

We had resolved to reverse the order of their journey by going to the Western Islands first, and coming home along the east coast. In this way we should avoid the September storms which kept them in the Hebrides. Now we also decided to go straight to Glasgow, and not to stop at Hamilton, where they spent a night.

On Saturday, July 30th, we began our walk in a cab, and continued it for many miles in a railway-carriage. We represented to ourselves that the country between Edinburgh and Glasgow, of which we knew nothing, was stupid, and that we must get to Glasgow for Sunday. There was no earthly reason for this, but it was an excuse, and we made the most of it.

Dr. Johnson says that "to describe a city so much frequented as

GLASGOW

is unnecessary," and again we are willing to take his word for it. But its Cathedral was the first of the many surprises Scotland had in store for us. We had heard of it, but that was all. One young lady of Glasgow, fresh from a tour on the Continent, told us that she had never seen it. We were therefore prepared to find it no great thing. The exterior did not disappoint our expectations, but we have seldom been more impressed with an interior, and this though we had just come from the loveliest churches of England.

The crypt, or rather the under church, is its pride, as indeed it well may be. A verger stood smoking a pipe at the south door, and we told him what we thought. J——, after three years' work in the English cathedrals, felt himself no mean authority.

"It's the finest in the world," said the verger.

"In Great Britain perhaps, but not in Europe," said J——; for we had been but a moment before comparing it, as it now is, a cold, bare, show-place, to the under church of Assisi with the frescos on the walls, the old lamps burning before altars, the sweet smell of incense, and the monks kneeling in prayer.

"I only tell you what those qualified have said," and the verger settled the matter and J——'s pretensions.

It was in the Glasgow crypt Rob Roy gave the warning to Frank Osbaldistone. The guide-book recalled the incident, which we had forgotten. Indeed the farther we went, the more we were reminded that to travel in Scotland is to travel through the Waverley Novels, and that these to us were but a name. Since our return we have tried to read them again, to be quite honest, with but indifferent pleasure. We are so wanting in appreciation that we find Scott's description of the crypt stupid, and we are not thrilled by the daring deeds of the MacGregor.

The Art Gallery in Glasgow was no less a surprise to us than the Cathedral. Its catalogue contains more Titians, Rembrandts. Hobbemas, and other great masters than any other in Europe. But if we wondered at the catalogue, we were still more astonished when we came to see the pictures!

We stayed in Glasgow until Monday morning, when we again took the train, but this time for a few miles only. We bought tickets for Kilpatrick, and a sharp lookout we had to keep for it from the carriage windows. At the stations, no one called the names, which, in true British fashion, were less easy to find than that of the best brand of mustard or of the best hotel in Glasgow. At Kilpatrick, when I pulled my head in after the usual search, J—— was already at the opposite door. He did not care where he was, he said; he would get out. In the distance, we could see Dumbarton Rock rising from the plain against a blue sky. Here, as in our plans for the day's journey, it was the one prominent landmark.

Kilpatrick is said to have been the birthplace of St. Patrick. I do not know what authority Black[C] has for the legend; certainly not that of the villagers. St. Patrick was no British man, one of them told us; and, moreover, he never lived in Kilpatrick, but on the hill. But had we ever heard of Captain Shonstone, the hairbor-maister? He was a great man.

We made a great show of briskness by going the long way round by the canal. This was the only time throughout our journey that we turned from the main road—except to take a short-cut. Mr. Lee Meriwether, in his Tramp Abroad, thought it an advantage of walking that he could leave the road to see whatever was to be seen near, but not from it. For our part, after the first mile, we never took an extra step for any sight; that is, whenever our knapsacks were on our backs. At Dumbarton we did not even climb the rock, though Dr. Johnson walked to the very top. Instead, we lunched and talked politics with the British workman in a coffee tavern.

After Dumbarton, we left the Clyde to follow the Leven. It was just beyond the town we first saw Ben-Lomond, a blue shadow on the horizon when the clouds were heavy above; a high bare mountain, seamed and riven, when the sun shone upon it. We lost sight of it in a succession of long, stupid villages; on the shady road, where the trees met overhead, we could see it again through the net-work of branches. Clouds were low on its heights, and a veil of soft light rain fell before it when, having left our knapsacks in the inn at Balloch, we rowed up the Leven, a little quiet river between low woods and flat meadow-land, to

LOCH LOMOND.

It was the first Scotch lake we saw, and we thought it very like any other lake.

We were off by eight in the morning. It was clear and cool, like an October day at home. Our road lay for a while close to the loch, then turned and went round the parks and lawns that sloped gently to the shore, so that it was only over a stone wall or through a gap in the hedge we could see the blue water and the wooded islands. We were now on the fighting-ground of the Colquhoun and the MacGregor, we learned from Black, who—we know it to our cost—is a better guide to the romance and history of Scotland than to its roads. It is but poor comfort when you ask for a good route to be given a quotation.

Rob Roy is the hero of Loch Lomond, and if you cross—as we did not—to the other side, you may see his cave and his prison and a lot of his other belongings. But I think that which is best worth seeing on the loch is the Colquhoun's village of Luss, with its neat, substantial cottages and trim gardens. In the Highlands you can have your fill of tales of outlaws and massacres and horrors; but it is not every day you come to a village like this, where men are allowed to live a little better than their beasts.

TARBET, LOCH LOMOND.

At the Colquhoun Arms in Luss we ate our lunch, and that was our undoing. It left us in a mood for lounging, and we had still eight miles to go. We found it harder work the second day than the first. Our knapsacks weighed like lead, and did not grow lighter; each mile seemed interminable. This was the more provoking because with every step the way grew lovelier. Almost all the afternoon we were within sight of the loch, while on our left the mountains now rose from the very road-side, and hedges gave place to hill-sides of ferns and heather-patched bowlders. Used as we both were to cycling, the slowness and monotony of our pace was intolerable. We longed for a machine that would carry us and our knapsacks with ease over the hard, dustless road. For one mile we tried to keep each other in countenance. J—— was the first to rebel openly. The Highlands were a fraud, he declared; the knapsack was an infernal nuisance and he was a fool to carry it. About three miles from Tarbet he sat down and refused to go any farther.

Just then, by chance, there came a drag full of young girls, and when they saw us they laughed, and passed by on the other side. And likewise a dog-cart, and the man driving, when he first saw us, waved his hand, taking us to be friends; but when he was at the place and looked at us, he also passed by on the other side. But two tricyclers, as they journeyed, came where we were; and when they saw us they had compassion on us, and came to us, and gathered up our knapsacks and set them on their machines and brought them to the inn and took care of them. And yet there are many who think cyclers nothing but cads on casters!

To tell the truth, had these two men been modern Rob Roys, we would have yielded up our knapsacks as cheerfully; nor would we have sorrowed never to see them again.

As we went on our way lightly and even gayly, we came to the inn at

TARBET,

and were received by a waiter in a dress-coat. It was a big hotel low down by the loch, with Ben-Lomond for opposite neighbor. The company at dinner was made up of Englishmen and Englishwomen. But everybody talked to everybody else. An Englishman, it seems, becomes civilized in the Highlands. There, those he sits down with at dinner, as is the way with Frenchmen, are his friends; at home, he would look upon them as his enemies.

After dinner we went to walk with the cyclers. As a great theatrical moon came sailing up through the sky behind Ben-Lomond, one told us in broad Scotch how from the Jungfrau he had once watched the moon rise, and at the sight had bur-r-r-st into tee-eers. But just then, had I wept at all, it must have been from sheer weariness, so I turned my back upon the beauty of the evening and went to bed.

GLENCROE.

It was well on towards noon the next day before we were on our way.

"It looks like business," said a young lady feeding a pet donkey, as she saw us start.

"It feels like it too," said I, dolefully, for the knapsacks were no lighter, and our feet were tender after the sixteen miles of the day before.

It was two easy miles to Arrochar, a village of white cottages and a couple of inns, one with a tap, the other with a temperance sign. Here we were ferried across Loch Long by a fisherman sad as his native hills. It was a wretched season, he told us; there were few people about. On the west side of the loch, the road was wild, and soon turned up to Glencroe. At the lower end of the pass, sheep browsed on the hill-sides, and in tiny fields men and women were cutting grass. The few cottages were new. But these things we left behind when the road began to wind upward in short, sudden curves. It was shut in on both sides by mountains; the sun glittered on their sheer precipices and overhanging cliffs and on the hundreds of watercourses with which their slopes were seamed. The way was steep, and I thought I should have died before I reached the top. At the last we made a short-cut up to the stone known, out of compliment to Wordsworth, as "Rest and be Thankful." There may be men and women with so much poetry in their souls, that after that stiff climb they will still care to find the appropriate lines in their guide-books, and then have breath enough left to repeat them. But we were too hot and tired to do anything but lie on the grass and, as we rested, look down upon and enjoy the wonderful pictures away beyond and below us.

In this lonely place a little loch lies dark and peaceful among the hills. Restil, its name is; I do not know what it means, but it has a pretty sound. Nothing could be more monotonous to tramp over than the long stretch of road which follows Kinglas Water almost to the shores of Loch Fyne. Our feet were blistered, and now ached at every step. Our shoulders were sorely strained. The things we said are best not written. When the coach from Inverary passed and until it was out of sight, we made a feint of not being tired. But the rest of the way we now grew eloquent in abuse, now limped in gloomy silence.

It was a mistake (which we afterward regretted) going to

CAIRNDOW,

and I do not know why we made it, except that in mapping out our route we had little help from Black. We had to learn from experience, which is but a poor way, if you find out your errors when it is too late to mend them. We were bound to Inverary, Dr. Johnson's next stopping-place. At the top of Glencroe, we should have turned to our left and walked down Hell's Glen to St. Catharine's, where there is a steam ferry to Inverary on the opposite shores of Loch Fyne. As it was, we had turned to our right and walked to a point almost at the top of the loch where there was no ferry, and where five miles lay between us and St. Catharine's. This was the coach road from Tarbet, and the guide-book has but little interest in travellers who go afoot. Though one hears much of walking tours in the Highlands, but few are made. In seven weeks' walking we scarcely met even a tramp.

We felt our mistake the more keenly because of the unpleasantness of the inn. The landlady greeted us warmly; like the ferry-man of the morning, she found there were too few tourists abroad. But her greeting was better than her rooms or her dinner, and she herself was unco' canny.

There was in the inn a young artist whose name she told us. We had never heard it, and this showed our ignorance; for he came from London, where he had won the first prize in an exhibition, and his wife, who was with him, had won the second, and altogether they were very great, and it was small wonder they did not care to dine with unknown travellers who carried sketch-books. But, indeed, I think in no country in the world except Great Britain will one artist not be glad to meet another when chance throws them together. An English artist wrecked on a desert island would not recognize a brother artist in the same plight as "one of the fraternity," unless the latter could make good his claims by the excellence, not of his work, but of his letters of introduction or the initials after his name. Nor does he unbend in the Highlands, where Englishmen of other crafts become so very sociable.

When we walked out after a bad dinner, the eastern hills rose against the pale yellow light of the coming moon. One star sent a shining track across the dark water, over which every now and again the wind marked its passage in long lines of silver ripples. Of all the sweet still evenings of our journey, we shall always remember this as the sweetest and stillest.

LOCH RESTIL.

It was in the morning that the landlady showed her canniness. She sent us off in her boat to be rowed across the loch; this, she said, we should find the shorter way to Inverary. But on the water one of the boys let slip the truth. We should have half the distance to walk if we went straight from Cairndow to St. Catharine's, there to cross by the steam ferry. Judge of our righteous wrath! When they rowed us back to the Cairndow side, the boys were careful to land us a good quarter of a mile below the inn. The worst of it was that once on shore again, we did not know whom to believe, the mother or the children. We were in a fine state of doubt, until a woman in the first cottage we came to reassured us. This was by far the shorter way, and we need not hurry, she added; we could not help reaching St. Catharine's in time for the ferry at eleven.

INVERARY.

She was right. It seemed a short walk by the loch. We stopped only once, that J—— might get an old ruin on the very water's edge. When we came to St. Catharine's we had an hour or more to sit at the inn door. It was one of those hot, misty days, which are not rare during the short Highland summer. The mountains were shrouded in a burning white haze. The loch was like glass. On its opposite shore, Inverary, white and shining, was reflected in its waters; and close by, at the foot of the hills, the turreted castle of the Argylls stood out strongly against the dark wood.

Here we made up our minds to go to Dalmally by coach. It was much too hot to walk. This left us free to take a nearer look at the castle, which, when we saw how painfully it had been restored, we thought less fine. In the town itself, though there is plenty sketchable, there is nothing notable, save the old town-cross, with its weather-worn carvings, which stands upon the shore, with loch and hills for background.

After lunch at the Argyll Arms, suddenly an excursion steamer and the coach from Tarbet poured streams of tourists into the place. Two more coaches dashed out from the hotel stables. The wide street was one mass of excursionists and landlords and waiters, and coachmen in red coats and gray beavers, and guards with bundles and boxes. There was a short, sharp struggle for seats, and in the confusion we came off with the best, and found ourselves on the leading coach, whirling from the glare of the loch, through the cool shade of a wooded glen, to the stirring sounds of the "Standards on the Braes of Mar," shouted by a party of Lowland Sandies who filled the other seats.

At the first pause, the coachman pointed to deer standing quietly under the graceful silver birches that shut in the road.

"Shush-sh-sh-sh!" screamed the Sandies, in a new chorus.

"Why canna ye put salt on their tails?" cried one.

Though later, cows and sheep and ducks fled before their noise, the deer never stirred. And yet, I suppose, in the season the Duke of Argyll and his guests come stalking these tame creatures, and call it sport.[D]

All that afternoon, through the woods of Glenaray and across the purple moorland beyond, afar over the banks and braes and streams around, there rang out the strong voice of Sandy off for a holiday. Highland valleys were filled with the pathetic strains of

"We started up a candy shop, John,
But couldna make it pay,
John Anderson, my jo!"

Highland hills re-echoed the burden of a loving father's song:

"For she's my only daughter,
'Tis I myself that taught her
To wear spangled clothes
And twirl round on her toes,
And her name it was Julia McNaughter."

Between songs there were jokes, as at the minstrels.

"Ta-ta, James; au revore," they called to men mowing in the meadows.

"And havna ye a letter for us?" they asked the old woman at a lonely post-office.

To a beggar by the way-side they gave witticisms with their pennies:

"Canna ye sing a Gaelic song?"
"Canna ye stand on your head?"
"He's a Grecian!"

If the point of their jokes is not very clear, the fault is not mine; I am trying to be not witty, but realistic.

There was one in the party—a woman, of course—who remembered duty.

"Isn't it bonny country?" she kept asking. "And what's yon bonny glen, my laddie?" and she poked the guard.

"And Sandy, mon, ye're nae lookin' at the scenery," she said to her husband.

"Toot, I clean forgot the scenery," and Sandy broke off in his singing to stare through his field-glass at a bare hill-side.

Almost within sight of Loch Awe we came to a hill that was so steep we all left the coach and walked a couple of miles up the shadeless hot road. An objection sometimes made to cycling is that it is half walking; but in the Highlands you would walk less if you rode a cycle than if you travelled by coach. From the top of the hill we looked down to where, far below, lay Loch Awe and its many islands. In this high place, with the beautiful broad outlook, gypsies had camped. I never yet knew the Romany who did not pitch his tent in the loveliest spot for miles around.

We had no definite plan for the night. We left it to chance, and we could not have done better. At the station at Dalmally we said goodby to our friends, who went gayly to another bonny glen, and we took the train for Loch Awe. It hurried us round the top of the loch in a few minutes to Loch Awe station, where on the platform were crowds of men in conventional tweed knickerbockers and Norfolk jackets, and women in jockey caps and fore-and-afts; and moreover, there were pipers with their pipes under their arms. From the carriage window we had seen the Loch Awe hotel, perched high on the hill-side, and looking down to the gray ivy-grown ruins of Kilchurn. It seemed no place for tourists who carried their baggage on their backs. But hardly had we left the carriage, when up stepped an immaculate creature in blue coat and brass buttons to tell us, with his cap in his hand, that our telegram had been received and the Port Sonachan boat was in waiting. That from all that elegant crowd of travellers he should have picked us out, the only two in the least disreputable-looking and travel-worn, showed, we thought, his uncommon discrimination. If, without knowing it, we had telegraphed to a hotel of which we had never heard, if in consequence a private steam-yacht was now at our disposal, why should we hesitate? Indeed, we had not time, for immediately a sailor seized our shabby knapsacks and carried them off with as much respect as if they had been Saratoga trunks. We followed him into a little yacht, which we graciously shared with an Englishman, his wife, two children, eleven bags, and three bath-tubs.

CROSS AT INVERARY.

The man in the blue coat kindly kept his boat at the pier until J—— had made quite a decent note of Kilchurn Castle. It has its legends, but it is not for me to tell them. Mr. Hamerton, who has written poetry about it and ought to know, declares they are not to be told in prose. Then we steamed down the loch, past the islands, one with a lonely graveyard, another with a large house; past the high mountains shutting in the Pass of Brander, to a hotel perfect of its kind. It stood on a little promontory of its own. A bay-window in the dining-room commanded the view north, south, and west over the loch. As we ate our dinner we could watch the light slowly fade and the hills darken against it. The dinner was excellent, and the people at table were friendly. There was a freedom about the house that made us think of Dingman's Ferry in its best days, of the Water Gap before its splendor came upon it, of Bar Harbor before it was exploited. It was not a mere place of passage, like the hotels at Tarbet and at Loch Awe; but those who came to it stayed for their holiday. All the men were there for the fishing, which is good, and most of them, tired after their day's work, came to dinner in their fishing clothes. Their common sport made them sociable. They were kind to us, but in their kindness was pity that we too were not fishermen. The landlord, who was a Cameron, was neither great nor obsequious. He had interest for this man's salmon and that man's trout, and good counsel for our journeying. He had been game-keeper for many years on the shores of Loch Awe, which he knew and loved. He had seen Mr. Hamerton, and his boats and his painter's camp. Since we have been to Loch Awe we have had an admiration for Mr. Hamerton which his book about it never gave us. Seldom do men show greater love for beauty in their choice of a home than he did, when he set up his tent on the island of the dead. As his books show, he is sufficient unto himself. Before the first month had ended, many might have wearied for other company save that of the hills and the water, the dead and a madman.

SCOTLAND AND THE HEBRIDES.

We left Port Sonachan in the morning. Mr. Cameron walked down to his pier with us, and a Duncan rowed us across to South Port Sonachan, where there is another hotel, and where we took the road to Loch Etive. Again the morning was hot and misty. In the few fields by the way men and women were getting in the hay, and the women, in their white sacks and handkerchiefs about their heads, looked not unlike French peasants. On each hill-top was a group of Highland cattle, beautiful black and tawny creatures, standing and lying in full relief against the sky. Two miles, a little more or less, brought us to a village wandering up and down a weed-grown, stone-covered hill-side. To our left a by-road climbed to the top of the hill, past the plain, bare kirk, with its little graveyard, and higher still to two white cottages, their thatched roofs green with a thick growth of grass, and vines growing about their doors, the loch and the mountain in the background.

But the cottages, which to the right of our road straggled down to a rocky stream below, had no redeeming whitewash, no vines about their doors. The turf around them was worn away. Some were chimneyless; on others the thatch, where the weeds did not hold it together, had broken through, leaving great holes in the roof. On a bench, tilted up against the wall of the lowest of these cottages, sat an old gray-haired man in Tam o' Shanter, his head bent low, his clasped hands falling between his knees. It was a picturesque place, and we camped out a while under an old cart near the road-side. Perhaps it would have been wise if, like Mr. Hamerton, we could have seen only the picturesqueness of the Highland clachan, only the color and sublimity of the huts, only the fine women who live within them. But how could we sit there and not see that the picturesqueness was that of misery, that whatever color and sublimity there might be—and to the sublimity, I must confess, we were blind—were but outward signs of poverty and squalor, and that the huts sheltered not only strong young women, but feeble old men like that pathetic figure with the clasped hands and bent head? We have seen the old age of the poor, when we thought it but a peaceful rest after the work of years. In English almshouses we have found it in our hearts to envy the old men and women their homes; but here despair and sadness seemed the portion of old age. I do not know why it was, but as we watched that gray-haired man, though there was a space of blue sky just above him, and the day was warm and the air sweet, it was of the winter he made us think; of the time soon to come when the cold winds would roar through the pass, and snow would lie on the hills, and he would shiver alone in the chimneyless cottage with its one tiny window. A few miles away, men in a fortnight throw away on their fishing more than these people can make in years. Scotch landlords rent their wild, uncultivated acres for fabulous sums, while villages like this grow desolate. If, when you are in the Highlands, you would still see them as they are in the stupid romance of Scott or in the sickly sentiment of Landseer, or as a mere pleasure-ground for tourists and sportsmen, you must get the people out of your mind, just as the laird gets them off his estate. Go everywhere, by stage and steamboat, and when you come to a clachan or to a lonely cottage, shut your eyes and pass on; else you must realize, as we did—and more strongly as we went farther—that this land, which holiday-makers have come to look upon as their own, is the saddest on God's earth.

Before we left the shade of the cart a little girl went by, and we asked her the name of the village.

"Kilchrennan," she said, with impossible gutturals, and then she spelled it for us.

It was a good sign, we thought; if Highland children to-day are taught to spell, Highland men and women to-morrow may learn to think, and when they learn to think, then, let the landlord remember, they will begin to act.

After Kilchrennan, the road crossed the moorland, Ben-Cruachan towering far to our right. At the foot of the one wooded hill-side in all this heather-clad moor we met with the only adventure of the morning; for it was here we espied in the road, in front of us, a black bull. It fixed its horrid eyes upon us; its horns seemed to stretch from one side of the way to the other. We cast in our minds whether to go forward or through the wood, but we thought it best to get the trees between us, and we fled up the mountain and never stopped until we had left it a goodly space behind; for indeed it was the dreadfullest bull that ever we saw.

We came to another wretched village down by Loch Etive. Here again in the sunshine was an old man. He was walking slowly and feebly up and down, and there was in his face a look as if hope had long gone from him. In England, scarce a town or village is without its charities; but in the Highlands, while deer and grouse are protected by law, men are chased from their homes,[E] the aged and infirm are left to shift for themselves. I think the misery of these villages is made to seem but the greater because of the large house which so often stands close by. We looked from the weary, silent old man and the row of tiny bare cottages, to a gay young girl and a young man in a kilt, who together strolled lazily towards the large house just showing through the trees.

KILCHRENNAN.

When Mr. Hamerton wrote his "Painters' Camp in the Highlands" he suggested a new route from Oban to Ballachulish by steamer up Loch Etive, and then by coach through Glen Etive and Glencoe. This is now one of the regular excursions from Oban, and one of the finest, I think, in the Highlands. In the glens we met no fewer than five coaches, so that I suppose the excursion is fairly popular. I wonder that Mr. Hamerton had a thought for the amusement of tourists, who are to him odious, as it seems necessary they should be to all right-minded writers of travel. Now, he might find loch and glens less fine. For the rest of that day, being tourists ourselves, we bore with all others patiently.

With Taynuilt we left behind even the sparse cultivation of the Highlands. From the boat we saw that the mountain-slopes were unbroken by road or path; there was scarce a house in sight. Through Glen Etive the road was very rough, the mountains were barren, and not a sheep or cow was on the lower grassy hill-sides. It was all a deer forest, the guard told us, and even the English tourists in the coach exclaimed against the waste of good ground. It is well to go first through Glen Etive. Bare as it seemed to us, it was green when compared to

GLENCOE,

where rocks lay on the road and in the stream and on the hill-sides. The mountains rose bare and precipitous from their very base, and trees and grass found no place to grow.

The guard gave us the story of the massacre, with additions and details of his own which I have forgotten. At the end of the drive he charged two shillings—for his trouble, I suppose. People write of the emotions roused by scenery and associations. I think it is afterwards, by reading up on the subject, that one becomes first conscious of them. However that may be, of one thing I am certain: we have rarely been more flippant than we were on that day. In Glen Etive J—— discovered that Highland streams, where clear brownish water flows over a bed of yellow, green, and red stones, look like rivers of Julienne soup. In the high moor at the head of the Glen we were chiefly concerned with a lunch of milk and scones for a shilling, and grumblings over Highland extortion. In Glencoe, guard and driver pointed out the old man of the mountain, who is here the Lord Chancellor, and Ossian's Cave, on high in the rocky wall, and stopped to show us the Queen's View. But we were more interested in two cyclers pushing their machines up the steepest, stoniest bit of road; in a man in a long black frock-coat and silk hat with crape band, who carried an alpenstock with an umbrella strapped to it, and strode solemnly up the pass; in a species of gypsy van near Glencoe Inn, in which, the guard explained, twelve people and a driver travelled for pleasure. A girl looking very pale and wrapped in shawls sat at the inn door. The party had stopped on her account, he said; the drive had made her ill—and no wonder, we thought.

LOCH LEVEN, FROM BALLACHULISH.

The stony pass led to a pleasant green valley, from which the road set out over the Bridge of Glencoe for the shores of Loch Leven and

BALLACHULISH.

Almost at once it brought us to a field overlooking the loch, where, apparently for our benefit, sports were being held.

The droning of the pipes made quite a cheerful sound, the plaids of the men a bright picture; and when, two miles beyond, we found the hotel with its windows turned towards the loch, we made up our minds not to push on to Oban, but to stay and spend Sunday here.

And so we had a second and longer look at the sports. Young men vaulted with poles; others, in full costume, danced Highland flings and the sword dance. Two pipers took turns in piping. One had tied gay green ribbons to his pipe, and he fairly danced himself as he kept time with his foot. And while we watched we heard but Gaelic spoken. We were in a foreign country.

OBAN.

The position of the hotel was the best thing about it. At dinner an irate clergyman and his daughter took fresh offence at every course, until, when it came to the rice-pudding, they could stand it no longer and left the table. We were less nice, and made a hearty meal; but we thought so poorly of it that the next day, which was Sunday, we found a lunch of bread and cheese and beer more to our taste. This we ate at the inn in Glencoe, in company with the clergyman and his daughter. They were still sore—why, I could not understand—about the pudding, and the clergyman was consoling himself with a glass of good whiskey.

The following day we came to

OBAN—

the most odious place in the Highlands, I have heard it called; the most beautiful place in the world, Mr. William Black thinks. When the west wind blows and the sun shines, there is nothing like it for color, he told J——. We had to take his word for it. We found an east wind blowing and gray mist hanging over town and bay, and we could not see the hills of Mull. When we walked out in the late afternoon, it seemed a town of hotels and photograph shops, into which excursion trains were forever emptying excursionists and never carrying them away again. Crowds were on the parapetless, unsafe embankment; the bay was covered with boats. In front of the largest hotels bands were playing, and one or two of the musicians went about, hat in hand, among the passers-by. Fancy Hassler at Cape May sending one of his men to beg for pennies! It was dull, for all the crowd. The show of gayety was as little successful as the attempt of a shivering cockney to look comfortable in his brand-new kilt.

Altogether, Oban did not seem in the least lovely until we could no longer see it. But as the twilight grew grayer and the tide went out, the great curve of the embankment was marked by a circle of lights on shore and by long waving lines of gold in the bay. At the pier, a steamer, just arrived, sent up heavy clouds of smoke, black in the gathering grayness. The boats one by one hung out their lights. Oban was at peace, though tourists still walked and bands still played.

It was gray and inexpressibly dreary the next day at noon, when we took the boat for Tobermory, in Mull. Through a Scotch mist we watched Oban and its picturesque castle out of sight; through a driving rain we looked forth on the heights of Morven and of Mull. Sometimes the clouds lightened, and for a minute the nearer hills came out dark and purple against a space of whitish shining mist; but for the most part they hung heavy and black over wastes of water and wastes of land. Sir Walter Scott says that the Sound of Mull is the most striking scene in the Hebrides; it would have been fair to add, when storms and mists give one a chance to see it. Pleasure parties sat up on deck, wrapped in mackintoshes and huddled under umbrellas. Our time was divided between getting wet and drying off down-stairs. The excitement of the voyage was the stopping of the steamer, now in mid-stream in "Macleod of Dare" fashion, now at rain-soaked piers. Of all the heroes who should be thought of between these two lands of romance, only the most modern was suggested to us, probably because within a few weeks we had been re-reading Mr. Black's novel. But, just as in his pages, so in the Sound of Mull, little boats came out to meet the steamer. They lay in wait, tossing up and down on the rough waters and manned with Hamishes and Donalds. Into one stepped a real Macleod, his collie at his heels; into another, an elderly lady, who was greeted most respectfully by the Hamish, as he lifted into his boat trunks marked with the name of Fleeming Jenkin. This gave us something to talk about; when we had last seen the name it was in a publisher's announcement, which said that Mr. Stevenson was shortly to write a biographical notice of the late Fleeming Jenkin.

At the piers, groups of people, no better off for occupation than we, waited to see the passengers land. We all took unaccountable interest in this landing. At Salen there was an intense moment when, as the steamer started, a boy on shore discovered that he had forgotten his bag. At the next pier, where a party of three got off, as their baggage was carried after them, we even went the length of counting up to forty bags and bundles, three dogs, and two maids. We left them standing there, surrounded by their property, with the rain pouring in torrents and not a house in sight. This is the way you take your pleasure in the Hebrides. We were glad to see among the boxes a case of champagne. At the last moment, one of the men, from the edge of the pier, waved a brown paper parcel, and told the captain that another like it had been left aboard. I am afraid he had forgotten something else; thence to Tobermory the captain did but revile him.

TOBERMORY

is a commonplace town with a semicircle of well-to-do houses on the shores of a sheltered bay. At one end of the wooded heights that follow the curve of the town is a big hotel; at the other, Aros House, a brand-new castle, in among the trees. The harbor is shut in by a long, narrow island, bare and flat. It seemed a place of endless rain and mist. But when we thought the weather at its worst, the landlady called it pleasant, and suggested a two miles' walk to the light-house on the coast. Children played on the street as if the sun shone. We even saw fishing parties row out towards the Sound.

We had to stay in Tobermory two interminable days, for it was impossible at first to find a way out of it. Our idea was to walk along the north and then the west coast, and so to Ulva; but the landlady was of the opinion that there was no getting from Tobermory except by boat. Fishermen in the bar-room thought they had heard of a rough road around the coast, and knew that on it we should find no inn. The landlord, to make an end of our questions, declared that we must go to Iona by the boat due the next morning at eight. This seemed the only chance of escape unless we were to return to Oban.

In the mean time there was nothing to do, nothing to see. The hotel windows looked out on the gray, cheerless bay, dotted with yachts. Once we walked in the rain to the light-house, and back across the moors. The wind never stopped blowing a gale.

"If anybody wants to know what Mull's like in summer," said J——, in disgust, "all they've got to do is to go to a New Jersey pine barren when an equinoctial's on."

At our early breakfast the next morning, the landlord told us that it was dark outside the bay. It must have been wilder even than he thought. No boat for Iona came.

It was after this disappointment that J——, by chance, in the post-office, met the Procurator Fiscal, whatever he may be. We have good reason to be grateful to him. He mapped out a walking route to Salen, and thence to Loch-Na-Keal, at the northern end of which is the island of Ulva—the soft Ool-a-va which always leads the chorus of the islands in Mr. Black's tragedy, "Macleod of Dare."

We did not care to walk to Salen in the rain; we were not willing to spend another night in Tobermory. Therefore, that same afternoon, when the boat from Skye touched at the pier, we got on board. We believed in the roughness of the sea beyond the Sound when we saw tourists prostrate in the cabin, with eloquent indifference to looks. But it was short steaming to

SALEN,

where we faced wind and rain to walk about a quarter of a mile to the hotel.

Here, as Dr. Johnson said in Glenelg, "of the provisions, the negative catalogue was very copious." The landlady asked us what we should like for supper; she might have spared herself the trouble, since she had nothing to give us but ham and eggs. However, we found the outlook less depressing than at Tobermory. There was no commonplace little town in sight, but only bare rolling grounds stretching to a bay, and on the shores the ruins of a real old castle, of which Mr. Abbey once very unkindly made a drawing, so that J——, for his own sake, thought it best to let it alone. There was, moreover, something to read. Lying with the guide-books were the "Life of Dr. Norman Mcleod," "Castle Dangerous," and the "Life of the Prince Consort." J—— devoured them all three, and the next day regaled me with choice extracts concerning the domestic virtues of the royal family.

When we awoke, the clouds were breaking. Across the Sound of Mull they were low on the heights of Morven, but the hill-sides were green, streaked with sunshine. Above were long rifts of blue sky, and in the bay a little yacht rocked on glittering water. We ate more ham and eggs, and made ready to begin our tramp at once.

Neither maid nor landlord could tell us if there were inns on the road to Bunessan. In Mull a man knows but his own immediate neighborhood. In the hotels, the farthest explorations are to the bed-rooms; in the cottages the spirit of enterprise is less. The interior of the island is an unknown country. The adventurous traveller goes no farther inland than Tobermory on the east coast, or Bunessan on the west. The ordinary traveller never goes ashore at all, but in the boat from Oban makes the tour of Mull in a day. As a consequence, there is no direct communication between the two sides of the island. It is strange that, though one of the largest of the Hebrides and within easiest reach of the main-land, Mull should be one of the least known and civilized. It is not even settled. People respect Dr. Johnson because in the days when steamboats were not, and roads at the best were few, he made a journey to the islands. But we cannot help thinking that if this respect is measured by hardships, we are far more worthy of it for having followed him to Mull a century later. Wherever he and Boswell went, guides and horses, or boats, as the case might be, were at their disposal; the doors of all the castles and large houses in the islands were thrown open to them. We were our own guides. It may be said that the steamboat was at our service, but it could not always take us to places we wished to see. If Dr. Johnson had to ride over moorland on a pony too small for him, he was sure that when evening came a Macquarry, a Maclean, or a Macleod would be eager to make him welcome. We walked on roads, it is true, but they were bad, and not only were we not wanted at the castles, but we did not want to go to them since they are now mostly in ruins; there was chance, too, of our not coming to an inn at nightfall. The inns of Mull are few and far between. Besides, for all one knows, those mentioned in the guide-book may be closed. If others have been opened, there is no one to tell you of them.

COAST OF MULL.

However, we took the procurator's word for the inn at Ulva, and started out again with our knapsacks, which seemed but heavier on our backs after several days' rest. All morning we tramped dreary miles of moor and hill, with the wind in our faces, and by lochs with endless curves, around which we had to go, though we saw our journey's end just before us. While we followed the northern shore of Loch-Na-Keal, high Ben-More, with its head among the clouds, was behind us. In front was the Atlantic, with heavy showers passing over it, and now blotting out far Staffa and the long ridge of the Ross of Mull, an encircling shadow between the ocean and the headland of Gribun; and now sweeping across the loch and the near green island of Inch-Kenneth.

A large house, with wide lawn and green fields and well-clipped hedges, just at the head of Loch-Na-Keal, and one or two small new cottages shut in with flaming banks of fuchsias, showed what Mull might be if in the island men were held in as high account as rabbits and grouse. We saw the many white tails of the rabbits in among the ferns, and though they live only to be shot, on the whole we thought them better off than the solemn, silent men and women who trudged by us towards Salen, where it was market-day, for it is their fate to live only to starve and suffer. The one man who spoke to us during that long morning was a shepherd, with a soft gentle voice and foreign Scotch, whose sheep we frightened up the hill-side.

ULVA

lay so close to the shores of Mull as scarce to seem a separate island. But the waters of the narrow Sound were rough. The postman, who had just been ferried over, held the boat as we stepped into it from the slippery stones of the landing. As he waited, he said not a word. They keep silence, these people, under the yoke they have borne for generations. The ferryman was away, and the boy who had come in his place had hard work to row against wind and waves, and harder work to talk English. "I beg pardon," was his answer to every question we asked.

The little white inn was just opposite the landing, and we went to it at once, for it was late and we were hungry. We asked the landlady if she could give us some meat.

"Of course," she said—and her English was fairly good—she could give us tea and eggs.

"No, but meat," we repeated.

"Yes, of course," she said again; "tea and eggs."

And we kept on asking for meat, and she kept on promising us tea and eggs, and I know not how the discussion had ended, if on a sudden it had not occurred to us that for her the word had none other but its Scriptural meaning.

While she prepared lunch we sat on low rocks by the boats drawn up high and dry on the stony beach. At the southern end of the island was Ulva House, white through an opening in a pleasant wood, and surrounded by broad green pastures. Just in front of us, close to the inn, a handful of bare black cottages rose from the mud in among rocks and bowlders. No paths led to the doors; nothing green grew about the walls. Women with pinched, care-worn faces came and went, busy with household work, and they were silent as the people we had met on the road. Beyond was barrenness; not another tree, not another bit of pasture-land was in sight. And yet, before the people were brought unto desolation, almost all the island was green as the meadows about the laird's house; and so it could be again if men were but allowed to cultivate the ground. Where weeds and rushes and ferns now cover the hills and the level places were once fields of grain and grass. To-day only the laird's crops are still sowed and reaped. Once there could be heard the many voices of men and women and children at work or at play, where now the only sounds are the roaring of the waters and the crack of the rifle.[F] Of all the many townships that were scattered from one end of the island to the other, there remains but this miserable group of cottages. The people have been driven from the land they loved, and sent hither and thither, some across the narrow Sound, others far across the broad Atlantic.

The Highlands and the Hebrides are lands of romance. There is a legend for almost every step you take. But the cruelest of these are not so cruel as, and none have the pathos of, the tales of their own and their fathers' wrongs and wretchedness which the people tell to-day. The old stories of the battle-field, and of clan meeting clan in deadly duel, have given way to stories of the clearing of the land that the laird or the stranger might have his shooting and fishing, as well as his crops. At first the people could not understand it. The evicted in Ulva went to the laird, as they would have gone of old, and asked for a new home. And what was his answer? "I am not the father of your family." And then, when frightened women ran and hid themselves at his coming, he broke the kettles they left by the well, or tore into shreds the clothes bleaching on the heather. And as the people themselves have it, "in these and similar ways he succeeded too well in clearing the island of its once numerous inhabitants, scattering them over the face of the globe." There must have been cruelty indeed before the Western Islander, who once loved his chief better than his own life, could tell such tales as these, even in his hunger and despair.

ROSS OF MULL, LOOKING TOWARDS IONA.

I know it is pleasanter to read of bloodshed in the past than of hunger in the present. A lately published book on Ireland has been welcomed by critics, and I suppose by readers, because in it is no mention of evictions and crowbar brigades and horrors of which newspapers make good capital. I have never been in Ireland, and it may be that you can travel there and forget the people. But in the Hebrides the human silence and the desolate homes and the almost unbroken moorland would let us, as foreigners, think of nothing else. Since our return we have read Scott and Mr. Hamerton and Miss Gordon Cumming and the Duke of Argyll, and many others who have helped to make or mar the romance and history of the Highlands. But the true story of the Highlands as they are I think we learned for ourselves when we looked, as we did at Ulva, from the laird's mansion to the crofter's hovel. It is the story of the tyranny of the few, the slavery of the many, which can be learned still more fully from the reports of the Royal Commission, published by the English Government.

When we returned to the inn we had no thought but to get away at once, how, we hardly knew. The landlady suggested three plans. We could wait until the morrow, when the Gomestra men, as she, a native, called them, and not Gometra men, as Mr. Black has it, would row us out to meet the steamboat coming from Iona. How "Macleod of Dare" like this would have been! We could be ferried over the Sound, and walk back by Loch-Na-Keal, the way we had come, then around its southern shores, and so across to Loch Scridain, at the head of which was an inn. Or we could sail across Loch-Na-Keal, and thus cut off many miles of the distance that lay between us and our next resting-place. We must, however, decide at once; there were two gentlemen below who would take us in their boat, but if we did not want them, they must go back to cut the laird's hay. Were we willing to wait until evening, they would take us for half price. The rain now fell on the loch, but we made our bargain with the gentlemen on the spot.

The landlady gave our sailing quite the air of an adventure. We need not be alarmed, she said, as indeed we had not thought of being; the only danger was to the gentlemen coming home. We found them at the landing, ballasting the boat with stones and getting on their oil-skins. We suggested that they should take us all the way to Bunessan, but they would not hear of it. Only the older of the two, an old gray-haired man, could speak English; they would not venture out to sea in such weather, he told us.

As we sailed past the white house we asked him if he had ever heard of Dr. Johnson. He shook his head and then turned to the other man, and the two began to talk in Gaelic. "Toctor Shonson, Toctor Shonson," we heard them say to each other. But they both kept shaking their heads, and finally the old man again said they had never heard of him.

When the wind swept the rain from the hills of Ulva, we could see that on the western side of the island the strange basaltic formation like that of Staffa begins. Near the low green shores of Inch-Kenneth a yacht lay at anchor. It belonged to one of the lairds of Mull, the boatman said. The people, who have barely enough to live on themselves, can still afford to support a yacht for their landlord. How this can be is the real problem of the Hebrides. To solve it is to explain the crofter question without the aid of a Royal Commission.

On the Gribun shore the landing-place was a long row of stones, slippery with wet sea-weed. The old man gave me his arm and led me in safety to the foot of the meadows beyond. He was the gentleman the landlady had called him. A Frenchman could not have been more polite. Nor was there in his politeness the servility, which in England makes one look to honest rudeness with relief. Caste distinctions may be bitterly felt in the homes of the Western Islanders, but in their manner is something of the equality which French republicans love. They can be courteous without cringing. Englishmen call this familiarity. But then the Englishman who understands true politeness is the exception.

It was, if anything, wetter on land than it had been on the water. To reach the road we waded through a broad meadow knee-high in dripping grass. The mist kept rising and falling, and one minute we could see the islands—Ulva and Gometra and Inch-Kenneth and even Staffa—and the next only grayness. In the narrow pass over the headland between Loch-Na-Keal and Loch Scridain the clouds rolled slowly down the mountains on either side, lower and lower, until presently we were walking through them. And as we went, as was proper in the land of Macleod of Dare, a strange thing happened; for scarcely had the clouds closed about us than a great gust of wind swept through the pass and whirled them away for a moment. Then the wind fell, and again we were swallowed up in grayness, and could scarcely see. Just as we were within sight of Loch Scridain, down poured torrents of rain. A little farther on and we were half-way up to our knees in a bridgeless stream that came rushing down the mountains across the road.

HEADLAND OF GRIBUN, FROM ULVA.

We passed two wind-and-rain-beaten villages and occasional lonely cottages, and the ruins of others. Mr. Hamerton says that nothing is more lovely to an artist than a Highland cottage after a rain; but the trouble is, you seldom see it after the rain, for in the Hebrides the rain it raineth every day and always. We came, too, to one big dreary house and a drearier kirk. The rest of the way there was but the wet wilderness, with the wet road following the curves of the loch, and even striking a mile or so inland to cross with the bridge a river which falls into it at its head. The inn was on the opposite shore; a short-cut lay across the water; there were boats moored to the northern bank where we walked, but not a ferryman to be found. A woman in a clean white cap, who stood in a cottage door-way, did not even know if there was a ferry.

Towards evening the rain stopped; the light of the setting sun shone on the hills before us as it seldom does except in pictures of the Hebrides; but on a walking tour when the chance for pleasure comes, one's capacity for enjoyment has gone. At the end of a day's tramp one can see little beauty, save that of a good dinner and a soft bed, both of which are the exception in the Hebrides.

The inn at

KINLOCH

was a two-storied cottage, with kitchen full of women and tap-room full of geese and hens below stairs, dining and sleeping rooms above. The bed-rooms were all occupied—by the family, I suppose, since we were given our choice; but after choosing, everything had to be moved out before we could move in. However, we made a shift to change our shoes and stockings, and in the dining-room we crouched over a big fire, while the steam rose in clouds from our soaked tweeds. The landlady came up at once with whiskey and glasses.

"And will you accept a glass from me?" she asked.

This was the Highland hospitality of which one reads, and it was more to our taste than the whiskey.

For supper of course we had ham and eggs, but it took no less than two hours for the landlady to cook them and to set the table. She was the sister of the landlady at Ulva, she told us. "And it's a good house my sister keeps whatever," she said; and then she wanted to know, "Had the wee laddie, Donald, ferried us over? And we had come from Salen, and were we going to Bunessan? It will be twelve miles to Bunessan whatever. And then to Iona?" It will be a great kirk we should see there, she had heard; but she had never been to Iona. She spoke excellent English, with the soft, drawling accent we thought so pleasant to hear, and we wished she could cook as well as she talked.

While we waited, J——, out of sympathy, fed a lean hound on meat-lozenges. He looked so starved that we could but hope each would prove for him the substantial meal it is said to be on the label of the box, and which we had not yet found it.

After supper it was two hours more before the bedroom was ready, and I think we had rarely been so tired. We sat nodding over the fire, sick with sleep. When we could stand it no longer, we made a raid upon the room while the landlady, who spent most of her time on the stairs, was on her hundredth pilgrimage below, and locked ourselves in. After that, she kept coming back with towels and one thing and another until we were in bed and asleep.

We had ordered more ham and eggs for eight o'clock in the morning, and asked to be awakened at seven. We might have spared ourselves the trouble—no one called us. It was half-past nine before breakfast was on the table, and it would not have been served then had not J—— gone into the kitchen to see it cooked. The only difference between our morning and evening meal was in the bill, where, according to island reckoning, tea and ham and eggs called supper, are worth sixpence more than eggs and ham and tea called breakfast.

At the last moment up came the landlady, again with whiskey and glasses.

"And will you accept a glass from me?"

But indeed we could not. To begin a twelve miles' walk with whiskey was out of the question. We afterwards learned that this was but good form on her part. The true Highlander always expects to drink a wee drappie with the coming and the parting guest. It would have been true politeness for us to accept. However, we did not know it at the time, and the whiskey was bad. She seemed hurt by our refusal. I thought her a shade less cordial when we came to say goodby.

The wind was still blowing a gale, but it drove the clouds beyond the bald mountains towards Ben-More, and brought no showers with it. Everything had grown bright with the morning but the cottages, and they, perhaps because of the contrast with the blue loveliness of water and sky and hills, seemed darker and more desolate than in the rain. Here and there along the loch a few were gathered in melancholy groups, pathless and chimneyless, smoke pouring from door-ways and through holes in the walls, mud at the very thresholds. For every cottage standing there was another in ruins. On the top of a low hill, over which we made a short-cut, was a deserted village, conveniently out of sight of the road. No traveller, unless he chanced upon it as we did, would know of it. It was not high enough or far enough from other cottages for the shielings upon which the Duke of Argyll thinks so much false sentiment has been wasted. We found a few black-faced sheep in possession of the ruins, and before them, I fear, have been driven not merely cattle from summer pastures, but men from their only homes. There were several school-houses between Kinloch and Bunessan, and we half hoped that these were in a measure responsible for roofless walls and desolate hearths. But the truth is, the Duke of Argyll and other landlords of Mull find it less trouble to collect rents from a few large tenants than from many small ones, and to suit their convenience the people have had to go. It is their land; why should they not do with it as they think best?

Almost all this Ross of Mull, on which we now were, belongs to the Duke of Argyll, the defender of Scotland as it was and as it is; and I think in all the Hebrides there is no place more desolate. We saw perhaps more signs of bitter poverty in Skye and in Barra. But in these islands the evicted have settled again upon the crofts of their friends or relations. Often it is because the many are thus forced to live upon land that can scarce support the few that all are so poor. But the Islander loves his home as he once loved his chief, and now hates his landlord, and he must be in extremity indeed before he will go from it. Knowing this, you feel the greatness of the misery in the Ross of Mull, from which the people have flown as if from a plague-stricken land. The greater part of it is silent and barren as the desert. We walked for miles, seeing no living things save a mere handful of sheep grazing on the hills, and the white sea-gulls perched on the low sea-weed covered rocks of Loch Scridain. And beyond the barren waste of land was the sea without a sail upon its waters, and the lonely islands, which we knew were no less desolate. The cruel climate of this far northern country has had little to do with the people's flight. Neither, indeed, has natural barrenness. The soil in the Highlands is not naturally barren, the Duke of Argyll himself has said. The few large farms by the way were good proof of what might be, even in the rocky Ross of Mull.

It seemed odd in the midst of the wilderness to meet two peddlers loaded with gay gilt frames. They thought it a "blowy" day, and so did a man who passed soon after in a dog-cart. But the women in clean white caps whom we met on the road could answer our questions only in streams of Gaelic.

We saw no one else but men and women getting in the harvest, or bending beneath great burdens of sea-weed as they toiled up the hill from the shores of the loch. There was a lonely graveyard by the way; but nowhere does death seem so great a blessing as we thought it must be here.

It was a long twelve miles, and the knapsacks were growing heavier with each day. But we were walking for our lunch; there were no inns on our road. For one reason or another, to me it was our hardest day's work. I think I must have starved had not J—— slung my knapsack on his already heavily laden shoulders. At the last,

BUNESSAN

came as a surprise. We were looking sadly at the endless line of road over the moors in front of us, when we turned a corner, and there was the little white town, with a pleasant inn, close to the waters of Loch Slach.

We had to wait—we were growing used to waiting—for our lunch; but at last when it came it seemed a banquet. We were not asked to eat either ham or eggs. Altogether, we were so well pleased that we brought the day's walk to an end. But it seemed that the maid who came to the door was less pleased with us. Our knapsacks, too large for comfort, were too small for respectability. Our clothes were weather-worn. The landlord bade her show us to a bedroom; but before we had finished our lunch she had locked every door in the house, carefully leaving the keys on the outer side, and, in her zeal, locking one man in. This, however, we did not learn until later, when English people staying in the inn told us what suspicious characters we were. They said she was stupid, which we had already found out for ourselves.

Bunessan is the show-place of the Ross of Mull; steamers occasionally land at a pier on the loch, two miles distant. Tourists come to the inn for the fishing. If they go no farther into the island, they probably carry away with them impressions of well-to-do people and benevolent landlords—the impressions, probably, the Duke of Argyll wishes to produce. After Kilpatrick and the other wretched groups of cottages we had passed in the morning, it did indeed seem happy and prosperous. It may be that we should have been less struck with it and its inn had it not been for the things we had already seen and experienced. Certainly, at dinner, dishes which we thought luxuries were found fault with by the rest of the company. But then they had their own opinion of Bunessan. They had taken it on trust, after hearing it praised; but no sooner had they come than they wished themselves away again. One suggested that friends should be induced to stay for a summer and educate the place, which might thus be made bearable for them in the future; but the others would not hear of it—one trial was quite enough. We were all very confidential about our plans, and took pleasure in mutually discouraging each other. J—— and I were foolish, they said, to go to Iona, where the cathedral was so insignificant that from the steamer they mistook it for the parish church. We, on our side, declared it worse than folly for them to go from Bunessan to Tobermory, the dreariest spot in all the dreariness of Mull. In the end we agreed that our coming to the island was a mistake, and that no one but Mr. Black could have a good word to say for it. Somehow, we made it seem—and it was a comfort to find some one else to abuse—as if he had brought us here under false pretences. But, indeed, whoever thinks to find Mull as it is described in "Macleod of Dare" cannot but be disappointed. Castle Dare must have been not very far from Bunessan, on the Ross of Mull. It was to this very inn Lady Macleod wished to send Gertrude White and her father; and when you have seen the home of the Macleods for yourself, you would have, like Mr. Black, no mercy for Sir Keith, but you would spare his sweetheart.

The fact is, Mr. Black's descriptions are misleading, though I must admit that even as we found fault with him, one of his strange things happened; for, far out beyond the loch and its purple hills we saw Staffa, and the sea below and the sky above it, turned to gold as the sun sank into the Atlantic. But then, as a rule, the things that happen in Mull are less strange than disagreeable. For one evening's loveliness, you must put up with hours of cold and damp discomfort. Of course, if you own a castle or a yacht, you can improve your point of view.

In the morning after this beautiful sunset, the wind blew the rain through the window in gusts over our toilet-table. Again no one called us. The morning hours of the Hebrides are even later than those of London, which we had hitherto supposed the latest in the working world. When we went down-stairs there were cups and saucers and plates on the breakfast-table, but nothing else; when we asked for our bill the maid said we should have it in a wee bittee, which we knew to mean long hours, and J——, as at Kinloch, took matters into his own hands.

For the first time we felt our superiority as we shouldered our knapsacks. Because of the early rain and wind, the other people in the inn had given up the boat to Tobermory. Already, breakfast over, the rain stopped and clouds grew light. We were on our way to Iona while they still made plans to follow us with their babies and bundles.

"ONE OF HIS STRANGE THINGS HAPPENED."

The road lay for six miles over the moors. There were two or three large houses with cultivated fields, a few black dreary cottages, and the ruins of others. But this end of the Ross of Mull was mostly, as when David Balfour walked across it, bog and brier and big stones. The coast was all rock, great piles of red granite jutting out in uneven masses into the sound that separates Iona from the Ross. When we reached it the ferryman had just come and gone. It was the 11th of August, and men with guns, in readiness for the morrow, were getting into a dog-cart, its horses' heads turned towards Bunessan. Two fishermen, in a boat filled with lobster nets, rowed to the tiny landing. We asked them to take us across, but with a word they refused. There was nothing to do but to sit on the rocks and wait, in fear lest the party from Bunessan, with their children and endless boxes and bundles—thirteen, one man told us he had—should overtake us and give us and our knapsacks no chance in the inns of Iona.

Wind and rain blew in our faces. The fishermen made off in their little boat, hugging the rocky shore. Above us, on the granite, were two cottages, no less naked and cold. Across the Sound we looked to a little white town low on the wind-swept water, and to a towered cathedral dark against the gray-green rocks. A steamer had just brought Cook's daily pilgrims to St. Columba's shrine.

ON THE ISLANDS.

All things come to those who wait, even the ferry-men of the Hebrides; but the steamer had carried the pilgrims far from St. Columba's Island towards Staffa before the little ferry-boat sailed with the wind, round the rocks, into the tiny bay by the landing. One passenger was put out, and a woman ran down from the black cottages for a bundle done up in a handkerchief, from which, as she took it, fell out broken pieces of bread and meat. Unconsciously, these people are always reminding you of their poverty.

There was no sailing in the teeth of the wind. The ferry-man and a small boy with him rowed, keeping under the shelter of the rocks as far as possible. At first both were silent. But we were fast learning that this silence is not the stupidity or surliness which the stranger in the islands is apt to think it. It comes rather of the sadness which has been the Western Islander's inheritance for generations, and of his shyness in speaking the foreign Scotch—that is, if he can speak it at all—for which he is so often laughed at. Once you break through the silence, and show the people that you do not look upon them as children or as slaves, they are friendly enough.

All this part of the Ross of Mull, as far as we could see, belonged to the Duke of Argyll, our ferry-man said. There had been trouble here as in Tiree, and the Commission was coming in a week. He had only his house and his boat. Five shillings and sixpence a year he paid; it was not much, but it was about the land there was trouble, and he had no land. We might have agreed with him and thought his rent no great thing, had we not seen his bare cottage, stranded on the bare rocks, probably built by himself or by his father before him. As it was, it seemed to us, if there was any question of payment, it should have been the other way.

Our stay in Iona was the one perfect part of our journey. In the first place, we were free to wander where and how we chose without thought of long miles to be walked before nightfall, and, better still, without our knapsacks, which we left in the inn. It was no small surprise to learn that we had our choice of three hotels. After careful study of "Macleod of Dare," we rather expected to be stranded on an almost uninhabited island. We can now recommend Mr. Black, on his next visit, to try the very excellent house at which we stayed. This was St. Columba's Inn. We went to it, not so much to do honor to the saint as because it was the biggest in the place, the nearest to the cathedral, and commanded the finest view.

IN THE TRANSEPT OF THE CATHEDRAL, IONA.

Southward, it looked to the broken walls of the nunnery rising high above house roofs and chimneys, and farther to a sweep of water, and farther still to the Ross of Mull, the low black rock of Erraid, the isle Mr. Stevenson has made famous, at its far end. In the distance, shadowy islands lay over the gray sea. To the north was the cathedral and the ruined monastery.

The inn was quite full, but the landlady promised us a room in the manse, a short way down the road.

Iona is the show-place by which we fancied the Duke of Argyll must hope to answer the question, once in a great while asked, about misery, terrorism, extortion, rent, in the Hebrides. Strangers come to the islands only to fish or to shoot. It is the exception when, as at Iona, there are sights to be seen. They have time to give only a glance to the Islander and his home. In Iona this home seems decent enough; if you stop to ask the Islander what he thinks, however, I doubt if it will be praise alone you will hear of his model landlord. Above the stony beach, where boats lie among the rocks, is the village street, lined with white cottages; and beyond, fields of tall grain and good pasture slope upward to the foot of the low green hills, whose highest peak rises to the north of the village, a background for the cathedral. Many of the cottages are new, others are whitewashed into comparative cheerfulness. The crops on the lower ground, the sheep and cattle on the hills, are pleasanter to see in an island where men live than endless wastes of heather. In Iona the civilization of the monks of the Dark Ages has survived even the modern sportsman.

IONA.

It is the fashion among writers of guide and other books about Iona to call it a desolate, lonely little isle. That it is little I admit; but you must go to the other side of the Sound for the loneliness and desolation. In proportion to its size, it seemed to us the most cultivated island of the Hebrides. I have heard it argued that for the Duke of Argyll not to forfeit his ownership was a true charity to his tenants, as if Iona was still the desert St. Columba found it. But I think its rental would be found a fair return for the charity of a landlord. As for the favorite myth that Iona is far out in the Hebridean Sea, I hardly know how it could have arisen, since the island is within easy reach of the main land and of Mull. There is no history of its old monastery that does not tell how the pilgrim coming to it from the Ross of Mull had but to call a summons from the granite rocks, and the monks would hear the cry and make ready to meet him in their boats. If this be true, however, his voice must have been phenomenal. The modern pilgrim could no more do this than he could wield the long sword or pull the crossbow of men of old. In our time a steamer comes to Iona every day from Oban, and twice a week another stops on its way to and from Glasgow and the Outer Hebrides. If Iona lay so near American shores it would long since have become a Bar Harbor or a Campo Bello. Even where it is it has its crowds of visitors. The writer who on one page tells you of its loneliness, on the next mourns its daily desecration when tourists eat sandwiches among the ruins.

TOMB OF MACLEOD.

These ruins, like everything else in Iona, belong to the Duke of Argyll. They are kept locked except when the keeper of the keys opens them to sight-seers. It may interest his Grace to know that we trespassed, climbing over the low stone walls into the cathedral enclosure. While we were there we were alone, save for black sheep, the modern successors of the monks. It is a fact that as we stood with our feet upon Macleod of Macleod's tomb, one of the black sheep—probably the very same which frightened Gertrude White in the moonlight—baaed at us. But the sun was shining, and we did not screech; we merely said shoo to it, and remarked upon its impudence.

If our piety, with Dr. Johnson's, did not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona, at least our way of seeing them was not unlike Boswell's. Perhaps this is why we think he showed more commonsense in Iona than elsewhere on his journey. He did not trouble to investigate minutely, he says, "but only to receive the general impression of solemn antiquity, and the particular ideas of such objects as should of themselves strike my attention." But indeed, unless you have a lifetime to spend in Iona, unless you are an architect or an archæologist, there is little need to care where the exact site of infirmary or refectory or library may be, or to whom this shrine was set up, that tombstone laid, or in what year walls were built, windows opened. It is enough to see how beautiful the monks could make the holy place they loved, here on this rough northern coast, as in among the vineyards and olives of the south, as in English fenland and wooded valley.

But if Boswell's impression was one of disappointment, ours was one of wonder to find the ruins so much more perfect than we had expected, and so beautiful, not only with the beauty of impressiveness as a whole, but with a grace and refinement of detail one does not look for in the far north. Much early Italian work is not more graceful than the carving on the capitals, the tracery in the windows, the door-way leading into the sacristy, the arches that spring from the cloister walls to their outer arcade in the monastery and church founded by St. Columba. If, as has been said, no ivy covers the walls, when we were there yellow flowers had pushed their way between the stones, while windows and rounded arches made a frame-work for the unbroken blue of sea and sky and pale distant hills. For so long as we were in the cathedral, the sun shone as if, instead of Hebridean seas, the Mediterranean lay beyond. True, this did not last half a morning; it rained before night; but the very breaks in the sunshine, and the way the clouds came and went, made the day more beautiful.

It is strange to see this wonderful work of other days in an island where, owing to their present masters, men can now scarce support existence. Centuries of progress or deterioration—which is it?—lie between the cathedral, lovely even in ruin, and the new ugly kirk close by. And yet when men had time to make their world beautiful the harvest was as rich. There was enough to eat and to spare for the stranger when the Celtic knots and twists were first carved on the cross standing by the cathedral door and looking seaward, and on the tombs lying within the chancel. But, and more's the pity, the same cannot be said to-day, when tombs are crumbling, and pale green lichens cover the carving of the cross. You feel this contrast between past and present still more in the graveyard by St. Oran's chapel, into which also we made our way over a stone wall. The long grass has been cleared from the gray slabs, where lie the mitred bishops and the men in armor, or where the intricacy of the Celtic designs makes space for a ship with its sails spread. They are "only gravestones flat on the earth," as Boswell says, and now neatly placed in senseless rows for the benefit of the tourist. But who would exchange them for the well-polished granite obelisks of the modern stone-cutter which rise at their side?

The old road leads from the cathedral, past McLean's weather-worn cross—which is so thin you wonder that it still withstands the strong winds from the sea—to the nuns' convent, whose ruins and tombs show it to have been only less fine than the monastery. Here the gate was thrown open. A small steam-yacht, which we could see lying at anchor in the Sound below, had just let loose a dozen yachtsmen upon the loneliness of Iona, and they were being personally conducted through the nunnery.

We trespassed no more, except in fields on the western side of the island, whither we walked by the very road, for all I know, along which St. Columba was carried in the hour before death, that he might once more see the monks working on the land he had reclaimed, and there give them his last blessing. But if we trespassed, no one objected. The men whom we met greeted us in Gaelic, which, when they saw we did not understand, they translated into a pleasant good-day or directions about our path.

There were many other places we should have seen. But since the whole island was a proof of St. Columba's wisdom in settling on it, nothing was to be gained by a visit to the particular spot where he landed or where he set up a cairn. And as for the Spouting Cave, we took the guide-book's word for it; for as Dr. Johnson would say, we were never much elevated by the expectation of any cave. Instead of sight-seeing, we stayed on the western shore, looking out beyond the low white and grass-grown sand-dunes and the bowlder-made beach to the sea, with its many rocky isles, the fear of seamen, black upon the waters. It is just such a coast as Mr. Stevenson has described in his "Merry Men." And, indeed, since I have written this I have read in his "Memoirs of an Islet" that it is this very coast, though more to the south of Iona, where the Christ-anna and the Covenant went down to the bottom, there to rot with the Espirito Santo and her share of the treasures of the Invincible Armada. When Columba sailed from Ireland to Hebridean seas the Merry Men had long since begun their bonny dance, for they are as old as the rocks against which they dash, and these rocks are older than man. When you know the dangers of this coast you have no little respect for the saint who dared them. St. Columba and his disciples, who set up cross and bell on lonely St. Kilda and the far Färöe Islands, were the Stanleys and Burtons of their time.

People who have never heard of crofters and their troubles can tell you all about St. Columba and his miracles. In Iona he interested us chiefly because all that is left of his and his followers' work gives the lie to modern landlords. Land in the Hebrides, they say, is only fit for deer and grouse. St. Columba showed that it could be made fit for man as well.

The landlady of St. Columba's Inn is true to the traditions of the island. She is as unwilling to turn the stranger from her door as were the abbots of St. Columba's monastery. In her own way she performs miracles and finds room for every one who comes. At first we thought that her miracles were worked at our expense. During our absence the party from Bunessan had arrived. Although their boxes were on the rocks of the Ross of Mull, awaiting the ferry-man's convenience, by their very numbers they had gained the advantage we feared, and had quietly stepped into the room in the manse, of which we had neglected to take possession. We were now quartered in the school-house. However, to judge from our comfort there, we lost nothing by the change.

It was at the late supper that we enjoyed the "dairy produce" of which Miss Gordon Cumming writes with rapture. It was a simple meal, such as one might have shared with St. Columba himself. The breakfasts and dinners, I should add, were less saintly, and therefore more substantial. As for the rest of the island, the fare is regulated by poverty and the Duke. We make a great to-do at home over the prohibition question, but in the Highlands they manage these matters more easily. Ducal option, we were told, reigns throughout the island. And yet the people of Iona are not grateful for thus being spared the trouble of deciding for themselves upon a subject whereon so few men agree. It has been whispered that drunkenness is not unknown in the Blessed Isle, and that natives have been seen by strangers—oh, the scandal of it!—reeling under the very shadow of the cathedral.

A white-haired clergyman, with pleasant old-fashioned manners and Gladstone collar, presided at supper. He introduced us at once to his family. "My son"—and he waved his hand towards a youth we had seen crossing the fields with his color-box—"my son is an artist; he is studying in the Royal Academy. He has already sold a picture for forty pounds. Not a bad beginning, is it? And my daughter," and he lowered his voice deferentially, "will soon be in the hands of the critics. She has just made some wonderfully clever illustrations for an old poem that hit her fancy!"

It was pleasant to see his fatherly pride. For his sake we could have wished her in an easier position.

Evidently, when you have exhausted saintly gossip in Iona you are at the end of your resources. The clergyman and two or three others with him were as eager to hear where we had been and where we were going and what we had seen, as if they had had nothing to talk about for a fortnight. We had decided to take the Dunara Castle from Glasgow, and in it to steam to Coll and Tiree and the Long Island. We had heard of the steamer, as you hear of everything in the Hebrides, by chance. And now the old man was all for having us change our minds. Here we were, safe in Iona, he said; why should we brave the dangers of the wild coast? Another man thought we had better not go to Harris; he had arrived there one Saturday evening, intending to remain two weeks; but the midges would give him no peace, and he had left with the steamer on Monday morning. The only comfort he could give was that they would feed us well on the Dunara Castle. It is strange that in Scotland, no matter what your plans may be, your fellow-tourists are sure to fall foul of them.

It was after this the clergyman brought out of his pocket a handful of the new coins, which we had not then seen.

"It's an ugly face," said J——, thinking only of the coin, though it would have been no libel had he referred to her gracious Majesty herself.

But the clergyman was down upon him at once. "I cannot let any one speak disrespectfully of my queen in my presence," he cried; "I love her too dearly to hear a word against her."

And he told us how, that afternoon, he had climbed to the top of the highest hill in Iona; and standing where Columba had stood so many hundreds of years ago, and remembering that this was the Jubilee year of his beloved sovereign, he dropped a new shilling into the cairn which marks the spot where the monks first made their home.

And yet I have a friend who, in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, has tried to prove that sentiment is fast decaying.

Later, when this same sentimentalist told us of the poverty, hunger, and misery in Iona, we thought that the shilling might have been dropped to better purpose.

It was on a gray morning that an old Hamish rowed us and two other passengers and a load of freight to the

"DUNARA CASTLE,"

which had dropped anchor in the middle of the Sound. On deck we found four young sportsmen in knickerbockers and ulsters, their backs turned upon the cathedral, firing at sea-gulls and missing them very successfully. In fact, I might as well say here, they kept on firing and missing so long as they were on the steamer. A man with a wife, four children, three maids, and a deckful of baggage, was already preparing to get off at Bunessan. The domestic energy of the Englishman is only less admirable than his business-like methods of pleasure. A party of Lowlanders were playing cards. A man of universal authority was telling a small group of listeners all about the geology and religion, the fishing and agriculture, of the islands. But as we sat in a corner, sheltered from the bitter cold wind, the talk that came to us was mostly of sport.

"I played that brute for half an hour!"

"I was fishing with a worm, I think."

"The best thing for shooting rooks is an air-gun."

"He wasn't a particularly good shot."

And all the time the brave sportsmen kept showing us what particularly bad shots they were. Is Tartarin's Chasse de Casquettes really so much funnier than what is called sport in England?

Suddenly one of the Scotchmen, leaving his cards to look about him, gave the talk an unexpected literary turn. "That feller, Louis Stevverson," he said, "laid one o' the scenes o' his Keednopped here," and he pointed to the Ross and Erraid.

"Woo's 'e?" said a cockney.

"'Arts is trumps," announced a third, and literature was dropped for more engrossing themes.

Emerson was right. It would be a waste of time for the literary man to play the swell. Even the handsome and gentlemanly authors of Boston, who are praised by Arlo Bates, when they become known to the world at large may be but "fellers!"

From the Sound we steamed past the great headland of Gribun, with the caves in its dark rocks, and into Loch Slach to the pier near Bunessan. The sportsmen were the first to alight, and, with guns over their shoulders, they disappeared quickly up the hill-side. The father of the family, like a modern Noah, stood on the pier to count his wife, children, maid, boxes, bundles, fishing-rods, and gun-cases, and to see them safely on dry land. It was fortunate for the original Noah that he did not have a whole ship's company to feed when he left the Ark. We were some time putting off and taking on freight. At the last moment, back ran the four sportsmen, bearing one bird in triumph. They parted with it sadly and tenderly. It was pathetic to see their regret after they had given it to a fisherman, who seemed embarrassed by the gift. I think they knew that it was the last bird they would bring down that day.

Then again we steamed past Gribun. Beyond it rose Inch-Kenneth and Ulva, really "Ulva dark" this morning. And one by one we left behind us, Iona, its white sands shining, its cathedral standing out boldly against the sky; Staffa, for a time so near that we could see the entrance to the great cave with its clustered piers; Fladda, Lunga, and the Dutchman's Cap. It was a page from "Macleod of Dare." And what were the Dhu Harteach men saying now? we could not help asking. Everywhere we looked were tiny nameless islands and bits of rock, sometimes separated only by a narrow channel. And now the sun shone upon us in our corner and made us warm. And even after the hills of Mull had begun to go down on the horizon, and Iona and Staffa had faded into vague shadows, we could see the Dutchman, like a great Phrygian cap set upon the waters.